Portræt af Frederik Berregaard

Louis Tocqué, one of the finest French portraitists of his generation and later a favourite of the French court, painted this half-length likeness of Frederik Berregaard while working for Danish patrons. Through his contacts in the Danish legation in Paris he came to a circle of prominent Danes who wished to be portrayed by the leading painter of the day, and it was for them that he made a series of portraits admired in their own time for their colour, their treatment of surface and light, and their gift for a personal, natural characterization. Here the sitter’s dark dress and the shadowed ground throw the face into relief, the single fully lit passage of the canvas. The canvas, 92 × 73 cm, is held by the Statens Museum for Kunst (National Gallery of Denmark).