Voille, Jean Louis

Born May 4, 1744, in Paris; died after 1803. French portrait painter.

Voille studied under F. H. Drouais. In the 1770’s he went to Russia, where he was Emperor Pavel I’s court painter. He painted mainly informal portraits, executed in silvery monochrome. The emotional tone of these portraits was close to sentimentalism. His subjects include E. A. Naryshkina (1787, A. S. Pushkin Museum of Fine Art, Moscow) and an unknown girl in a blue dress (1791, Tret’iakov Gallery).