The King's Two Teeth

Abstract

Hyacinthe Rigaud's famous swagger portrait of Louis XIV in full regalia presents 'Louis the Great' at the height of his powers, framed in an ostentatiously theatrical setting. Painted in 1701, displayed at the Paris Salon in 1704, the work dazzles the viewer with sumptuous ceremonial display.1 Crown, sceptre, great sword of state, and heavy, fleur-de-lisee ermine robes evoke the putatively timeless nature of the French monarchy. The king's posture is unfazed, relaxed, mildly disdainful. He inverts the royal sceptre playfully as though it were a walking stick, or a child's toy or the swagger-stick of a military commander; the gesture magnifies rather than diminishes his grandeur. Strongly featured are his sculpted legs, which the chronicler, the due de Saint-Simon, a far from sycophantic aficionado of court life, adjudged the finest he ever saw. They painstakingly replicate the pose which Louis, as a young man, had adopted when dancing as Apollo in court ballets as his own Premier Dancer, at a time when the Sun King was in the ascendant.2 The king's lofty and impassive gaze, almost dictating reverential obeisance from the humble spectator, emerges from a body polished, primped and more than a little prettified for the occasion. The calf muscles are scarcely those of a sextuagenarian: especially one often crippled by gout and habituated to being pushed round in a wheelchair. The red heeled courtier shoes lift the ruler well above his scarcely impressive five foot three inches. The copious curls of a towering black wig obscure the fact that Louis was precociously bald. And the unruffled forehead displays a ruler with scarcely a care in the world even though when it was painted Louis was embarking with heavy heart on what would be his last, ruinous war, the War of Spanish Succession (1701-14). Yet in this mythologizing and mendacious portrait which seeks to erase the passage, even the existence, of time, one feature stands out and shocks for its stark naturalism: hollow cheeks and wrinkled mouth reveal a ruler with not a tooth in his head.