Joseph Ducreux was a French portrait painter, born in Nancy on June 26, 1735, who died in 1802. In 1769 the French court sent him to Vienna to paint the young Marie Antoinette, and he spent the rest of his career working for the royal family and Paris society.
He is famous today for something else: a series of self-portraits in which he laughs, yawns, gasps and points at the viewer. The pointing one became an internet meme.
He went on to paint several of the men who brought the monarchy down. Yet the faces that send people looking for him today are his own.
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Those faces were made on purpose, and there are a lot of them. Ducreux painted more than thirty self-portraits, and in the most famous ones he drops the pose of a gentleman painter. He yawns so wide his jaw seems about to crack, presses a finger to his lips, recoils in fright, or grins with a finger aimed straight out of the frame.
He gave them titles, too: The Mocker, The Laugher, Silence, Surprise Mixed with Terror. Then he sent them where serious painters sent serious work, to the Salon, the official exhibition held at the Louvre in Paris, and to the yearly show of the Royal Academy in London.
A painter who worked for the royal family was now hanging his own open mouth in two of the most formal exhibitions in Europe. No letter or essay by Ducreux explains why.
The confusion reaches even the walls where the pictures hang. Many websites place The Mocker, the grinning man with the raised finger, at the Getty in Los Angeles, but the Getty owns the yawn. The Mocker has been in the Louvre's collection since 1920.
Ducreux did not start out as a joker. He was born in Nancy, in the duchy of Lorraine in eastern France, the son of Charles Ducreux, first painter to Stanislas Leszczynski, the former king of Poland who ruled Lorraine.
He trained with his father, moved to Paris around 1760 and married there that November, at the church of Saint-Sulpice.
In Paris he made his living painting portraits. Nine years after his own wedding, another wedding, between France and Austria, changed the course of his career.
Vienna and a girl of thirteen
In 1769 the grandson of Louis XV, the future Louis XVI, was promised to Maria Antonia, the youngest daughter of the Austrian empress Maria Theresa. France would later know her as Marie Antoinette. She was thirteen.
Versailles wanted a faithful picture of the girl before the wedding, and the man chosen to paint her was Ducreux. The trip would pay him in gold and diamonds.
What You'll Discover
Why the court sent him to Vienna.
What a girl's portrait earned him.
Where he went when the Revolution came.
Every face he made, one by one.
How his last walk ended.
Where the real faces hang today.