Caption from the museum's website:
"Evidence for the woman’s traditional identification as Madame Lambert de Thorigny, posited by Wildenstein when this portrait surfaced in 1902, is not conclusive.[8] A document which seems to have been supplied to The Met by Gimpel & Wildenstein in 1903, when the painting was acquired, further identifies the sitter as Hélène Lambert de Thorigny, probably because of the existence of a print by Pierre Drevet (1663–1738) after Largillierre of a portrait of that lady, the sister of Claude Lambert. However, the print is not after our painting, nor, apparently, of our sitter. The sale of the collection of Jacques André, comte de Ganay (1863–1912) on June 4, 1903, moreover, included a portrait listed as “Madame de Lambert de Thorigny,” too late to be the present work and suggestive of misidentification of either The Met’s painting, the Thorigny painting, or both.[9] A typescript in the archive files which dates before 1905 calls her instead Marie Marguerite Bontemps (died 1701), who was married in 1682 to Claude Jean-Baptiste Lambert de Thorigny (died 1702). The alternate identification was apparently based on a biography from a standard source of reference published in 1872 (see Notes). Largillierre painted at least three other portraits of members of this wealthy family, the owners of a great house on the Île Saint-Louis in Paris which houses the celebrated Galerie d’Hercule decorated by Charles Le Brun. While possible, the identification with the Lambert family is entirely speculative.

If the woman’s identity can be solidified, it may be possible to eventually identify at least the first name of the young man. In other instances, inventories and contracts have allowed historians to access the names and sometimes even the origins of enslaved individuals. In the case of the present portrait, the other possibility follows the iconographic program described above. It may be that Largillierre included the young man in much same the manner as the parrot and dog, in order to create an image of the woman’s comfort at the center of global trade, styling herself with the world bowing before her power and racial superiority. In other portraits, notably a work in which Largilliere collaborated with the flower painter Blin de Fontenay (1653–1715; Honolulu Academy of Arts, fig. 2), the Black figure is more clearly a stock figure than an individuated subject. Rather than the recognition of a longstanding relationship between a given white sitter and an individual in his or her household, this use of the Black figure encapsulates a more transparently racist ideology played out on canvas. That Largillierre inserted or removed such markers at will according to a code of meanings is apparent in a comparison of The Met’s painting to other portraits by the artist. The parrot, for example, surely did not belong to the sitter of The Met’s painting, for it was recycled identically from Largillierre’s earlier Portrait of the Sculptor Pierre LePautre (1689; Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena; fig. 3). A drawing or oil sketch would have served as a model in his studio whereby Largillierre or a workshop assistant repeated the animal. Sitters could, in fact, choose among a host of preexisting options, including for their own hands and drapery, and would pay more for new inventions.[10] Having established the pose of the white figure in The Met’s painting, in 1711 another sitter opted for exactly the same position—but for reasons of cost or taste he opted to omit the elaborate apparatus of parrot, fountain, and enslaved figure in favor of a simple landscape and orange blossoms (1711; Musée de Grenoble; fig. 4).[11] Situating The Met’s portrait in this host of options in which the sitter chose one over another draws out its importance: on the one hand, it unveils some of the mechanisms behind wealth and power in early modern Europe with exceptional transparency; on the other, it underscores this particular sitter’s stark willingness to announce—with apparent comfort—an affiliation with racial inequality.

David Pullins 2020"