Sun King Exhibit at Chateau de Versailles

King Louis XIV of France in the Costume of the Sun King in the Ballet "La Nuit," 1653

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“There was nothing he liked so much as flattery,” the Duc de Saint-Simon remarked in his “Memoires,” “the coarser and clumsier it was, the more he relished it.” The numerous portraits of the king in the show bear this out: Hyacinthe Rigaud’s 1701 canvas created a new genre, the quintessential image of royal majesty with all its attributes.

Equestrian statues likened him to Roman emperors. On tapestries, he appeared as Apollo or Alexander the Great.

On his military campaigns, the king was accompanied by Adam Frans van der Meulen, the official battle painter, whose sketches were worked up into the paintings you see in the exhibition. As engravings they also circulated across Europe, making sure nobody ignored the triumphs of the French army.

The exhibition say nothing about the scandals of the time such as the Affair of the Poisons, in which one half of the court suspected the other of unspeakable crimes, nor the still unsolved mystery of the Man in the Iron Mask, who died in 1703 in the Bastille and who may or may not have been the king’s twin brother.

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