Jacques Courtin (1672-1752) – Portrait of an officer.

Portrait of an officer
 Jacques Courtin (1672–1752)
 Oil on original canvas, in its original frame
 Signed and dated on the reverse:
 “Jacobus Courtin Pic. Reg. 1739”
 Dimensions

 
 Framed: 99 × 83.5 cm
 
 Image size (excluding frame): 82 × 65.5 cm


 A student of Louis de Boullogne fils, Jacques François Courtin won the second prize at the Prix de Rome in 1700 and 1701. In 1707, the Goldsmiths' Guild of Paris commissioned him to paint the Maypole of Notre-Dame.
 He was accepted into the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture in 1710 thanks to the presentation of Lot and His Daughters. His works, disseminated by numerous engravers such as the Poilly brothers, Robert Bonnart, and Jean Haussard, were appreciated by many art lovers, including Pierre Crozat.
 Jacques Courtin's career was that of a celebrated painter. In 1724, he and Anne-Marguerite Boisard lived on Rue Saint-Martin. Eleven years later, in 1735, he moved to Rue de la Grande-Truanderie, where he lost his wife. He then married Marguerite Mathieu, his second wife. This marriage connected him to the family of the painter Pierre Mathieu, who came from the same province as his own.
 Pierre Mathieu was born in Dijon in 1657; he had been admitted to the French Academy two years earlier, on June 30, 1708. The Mathieu family enjoyed considerable wealth, and Jacques Courtin remarried under a prenuptial agreement. An extract from the Paris auction records of July 1739, registered at the Châtelet, sheds further light on his family situation. His sister-in-law, Louise, was married to Nicolas Pinsot, a lawyer at the Parliament; his brother-in-law, Anne François, was an engineer for the King. The brother and his two sisters each owned a third of a house on the rue de Reuilly, in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, with a courtyard and garden, adjoining that of the Baron de Belsay.
 They had inherited it from their cousin Marie-Friquet de Vauroze, herself the niece of Jacques Friquet de Vauroze, a painter of the Royal Academy, who died on June 25th. From 1737 until 1751, Jacques Courtin participated in all the Salons, except for that of 1739. He treated subjects borrowed from history or fable, genre scenes and portraits with the same ease.
 Source Michel Faré “An independent painter Jacques Courtin from the Royal Academy”