Portrait of a Slave Trader? The Unknown Man by Perronneau in the National Gallery of Ireland
By Dominique Raynaud
Published in Eighteenth-Century Ireland, January 2025.
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Published in Eighteenth-Century Ireland, January 2025.
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Abstract
The National Gallery of Ireland holds a portrait by Jean-Baptiste Perronneau (1715–83) entitled Portrait of a Man and dated 1766. By cross-referencing a number of material and historical clues, it is shown that the man portrayed is none other than Jean-Gabriel Montaudouin (1722–81), a shipowner from Nantes, Physiocrat and slave trader, author of a memoir of agriculture, arts, and commerce (1756), which served as a model for the French agricultural societies of the late eighteenth century.