Abundance

Abundance, painted in 1701 and held at the Museum of the History of France at Versailles, belongs to the tradition of allegorical personification that dominated French royal decorative culture in the period of Louis XIV. Abundance — Abundantia — was one of the classical virtues or blessings of good governance, typically depicted as a female figure surrounded by overflowing cornucopia, fruit, grain, and children. In the iconographic vocabulary of Versailles, Abundance figured among the promises of the Sun King's reign: prosperity, agricultural richness, and divine favour flowing from just and powerful rule. Noël Coypel contributed multiple allegories to the royal decorative programmes, and a 1701 Abundance — painted when he was in his early seventies, near the end of his career — demonstrates his sustained productivity and the continued demand for this kind of celebratory allegory even in the final decades of Louis's reign, which were marked increasingly by ruinous wars and economic difficulty.

Oil on canvas in the allegorical decorative mode Coypel had practised throughout his career. The figure of Abundance is handled with the soft, idealising beauty favoured in French academic allegory — full-bodied, gracefully posed, luminously lit. Fruit, grain, and vessels of plenty are rendered with enough naturalistic specificity to be clearly legible without distracting from the primary symbolic figure. The palette is warm and celebratory.