Two Monginot family portraits by Rigaud and de Troy and the dispute over authorship

A witty dialogue between painters, or an amusing family tradition? The first image is a work of 1688 by the French Baroque painter Hyacinthe Rigaud, showing the 21-year-old Jean-Baptiste Mongino, whose biography will tell us little, with an oval portrait of his young wife. The next canvas, of 1700, is attributed to the brush of Jean-François de Troy, a later painter of the Rococo era. It shows Madame Mongino, the mother, in a widow's cap and holding a portrait of her late husband, Mongino senior. Paintings that depict other paintings are not so very rare in museum collections, but this case of family portraits is the most interesting of all. By their taste for ancestral portraits, well-to-do Provençals have set modern art historians no small number of riddles, and these scholars keep quarrelling over the attribution of the works, because both pictures, for all their vivid and characteristic elements, somewhere depart from the manner of their creators. The matter is complicated further by the integration into the portrait of a secondary image, executed with the marks of another hand.