Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition/Jean François de Troy

TROY, Jean François de (1679-1752), a French painter, highly endowed by nature, was born at Paris in 1679. He received his first lessons from his father, him self a skilful portrait-painter, who afterwards sent his son to Italy. There his amusements occupied him fully as much as his studies; but his ability was such that on his return he was at once made an official of the Academy and obtained a large number of orders for the decoration of public and private buildings, executing at the same time a quantity of easel pictures of very unequal merit. Amongst the most considerable of his works are thirtysix compositions painted for the hotel of De Live (1729), and a series of the story of Esther, designed for the Gobelins whilst De Troy was director of the school of France at Rome (1738-51),—a post which he resigned in a fit of irritation at court neglect. He did not expect to be taken at his word, but found himself forced to return to France, and was making ready to leave when he died suddenly (24th January 1752) of an attack on the lungs.

His desire to make a figure in the world led him to neglect his more serious duties and injured his professional reputation. The life-size painting (Louvre) of the First Chapter of the Order of the Holy Ghost held by Henry IV., in the church of the Grands Augustins, is one of his most complete performances, and his dramatic composition, the Plague at Marseilles, is widely known through the excellent engraving of Thomassin. The Cochins, father and son, Fessard, Galimard, Bauvarlet, Herisset, and the painters Boucher and Parrocel have engraved and etched the works of De Troy.