Louis XIV Pleading with Louise de La Vallière at the Carmelite Convent at Chaillot

Pierre-Maximilien Delafontaine · 1780/1800

Medium

Pen and black ink, with brush and brown and gray wash, heightened with white gouache, over graphite, on cream laid paper, laid down on card

Original size

Primary support: 32.9 × 34.4 cm (13 × 13 9/16 in.); secondary support: 39.4 × 42.6 cm (15 9/16 × 16 13/16 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Neoclassicism

This intimate scene captures one of the most emotionally charged moments of Louis XIV's reign — a king at the threshold of a convent, face to face with the woman he once loved and could not hold. Delafontaine worked in a refined Neoclassical tradition, and this drawing showcases the kind of careful draftsmanship prized by French academicians of the late eighteenth century. The layered technique — pen and ink underpinning delicate brown and gray wash, lifted with white gouache highlights — gives the composition a sculptural depth that reads almost like a staged relief. The muted palette lends the encounter a gravity befitting its subject. Louise de La Vallière, once Louis XIV's favorite mistress, withdrew to the Carmelite convent at Chaillot in 1674 and took the veil as Sister Louise de la Miséricorde — and the king did, by documented accounts, visit her there. Our hand-painted oil reproduction translates the tonal subtlety of Delafontaine's original into the richness of oil on canvas, preserving the quiet drama of the composition while giving it the physical presence and warmth that only a hand-applied medium can achieve.