Little is known of his career, though he was very probably a pupil of François de Troy. He was agréé (registered) at the Académie Royale in Paris, but never reçu (accepted), allegedly on account of his failure to submit his reception pieces, portraits of the sculptor Jean Raon and the painter Antoine Coypel, though this account is disputed by some authorities. He did, however, become a member of the Académie de Saint-Luc and worked mainly as a portraitist. He also produced many têtes de fantaisie for which he often used himself as the model and which anticipate those by Jean-Honoré Fragonard. Grimou was one of a number of French eighteenth-century painters strongly influenced by Dutch art, in particular by Rembrandt and his followers, and he was dubbed ‘le Rembrandt français’ by his contemporaries. Among his patrons was the comtesse de Verrue, nicknamed the Dame de Volupté on account of an amorous attachment to a member of the house of Savoy, who employed him to make copies of the Northern masters to decorate her Parisian mansion in the rue du Cherche-Midi.

In this picture the artist has portrayed himself in fancy costume looking out at the viewer, a wine glass in his raised left hand and a  fluted carafe in his right. His right arm rests on a table on which are arranged a plate, a slice of sausage, a knife and a portion of a loaf of bread. Antecedents for drinking figures of this type can be found in the work of the Utrecht Caravaggists such as Gerrit von Honthorst and Hendrick ter Brugghen, though the style of the picture is closer to that of Rembrandt and his followers such as Govert Flinck. The merry revelry depicted in Grimou’s self portrait may have had a serious purpose, however, and alluded to more intellectual pursuits. It is possible that there was an autobiographical element to his fascination with this subject for his uncle was the innkeeper Procope, founder of the famous Café Le Procope in Paris (which still exists today). With its proximity to the Comédie Française the Procope rapidly became a meeting place for  ne wits and intellectuals and would number amongst its clients Diderot, Jean Le Rond d’Alembert and Benjamin Franklin, to name but a few. Hedonistic pleasure could go hand in hand with serious debate.

This text was originally published in Facing the World: Self-portraits from Rembrandt to Ai Weiwei, 2016.