Portret van Maximilien de Béthune 1766

This is Pierre Chenu’s portrait of Maximilien de Béthune, made in France sometime in the late 18th century. It is a small engraving, meant for circulation and display in albums or books. We see the subject, Maximilien de Béthune, within an oval frame, richly decorated with ribbons. He is dressed in armor and wears a large ruff, visual codes which tell us that he is a figure from the past. Indeed, Béthune lived from 1559 to 1641 and was a celebrated statesman under King Henri IV. Chenu made this print more than a century after Béthune’s death, but the image evokes a nostalgic vision of the French past. It was a time when France was building its modern state institutions. Art historians ask, why did people in the 1700s want to look back to the 1600s? What did they admire about that earlier time? Prints like this one can give us a sense of French cultural and political values in the Age of Enlightenment. By studying prints, books, and other objects, we can understand how people thought about history in the past.