A Man and His Family (Richard Cantillon)

0:00I don't use PowerPoint. That's going to become obvious through the course of this lecture. I also don't have any expertise on which to base this paper. I'm in a little bit of trouble, unlike Greg.

0:19As some of you know, I've been researching and writing and publishing on the work of Richard Cantillon, The first economic theorist, someone who basically created economic theory as we know it around 1730. Most of those articles that I've published have basically are there to support what Murray Rothbard wrote about or speculated about in terms of Richard Cantillon, in terms of his economics, his policies, his political outlook. Murray had to speculate a lot in his History of Economic Thought Book, and I basically went back and filled in the holes, provided the evidence, showed that basically Murray's hunches and beliefs in the absence of that information were correct.

1:08So I've been working on this about 15 years as one of my main research threads, and one of the things about Richard Cantillon is that he's a very mysterious character in the history of Economic Thought. We don't know when he was born. There are large gaps in his life where we don't really know much about what he was up to. He was supposedly murdered, but his biographer thinks that he staged the murder. I actually think he was assassinated. So there's a lot of mystery about this man. He was very secret, as most bankers would have been in that day. And one of the things that Richard Cantillon writers have in the back of their head is that there's no image of this man. There's no bust, there's no painting, there's no drawing of this man where, in fact, there should be. And so I took it upon myself as a hobby to see if I could track down down an image of Richard Cantillon and really got nowhere for a long period of time.

2:20And then one day, I walked into the Louvre, and I walked into one of the older sections of the Louvre called Le Lacrosse Collection. And the first thing I saw was this painting by a Parisian artist, Nicolas de Largier, and And I looked at it across the room and I got chills as a result. The reason I did was because Cantillon was married and had one child, a girl. And it would have been very unusual for a French-Parisian family to be limited to that sort of scenario.

3:07So the basic family construction was right. And then I walked over and saw the nameplate on the painting, the name of the artist, Nicolas Largier, and that was a key that set me off on this topic. So I'm going to go through a list of evidence that I used to try to reconstruct a case that that man right there on the left-hand side is actually Richard Cantio. Now when I first got to this question, I had absolutely no idea how to answer it. So I've been digging a lot of dry holes in this hobby, making a lot of mistakes, but making some progress as well. Now this artist that painted this painting was the most famous portrait artist in Paris at this time.

3:59Both Cantillon and Largier lived in Paris at the same time. actually lived pretty much in the same place. Cantillon's house was less than a mile from Largier's house. Cantillon worked in John Law's bank. Largier was a prominent customer in John Law's bank. Both had occasions to frequent the institution and I suggest that they probably knew one another. Cantillon's Mises' bibliographer claims that Cantillon had a taste for art. He put together art deals, and he had contacts in the world of art. And most prominent connection between Cantillon and Largier, which also gave me some more chills, was that this painting is the wedding portrait of Cantillon's wife, Marianne Cantillon.

4:57And this work was executed in around 1722. And so we have supposedly this person right here would have to be this person right here. The problem is they don't really look alike. The dating of the painting by the Louvre was originally 1710 or 1750. For this painting to be Richard Cantillon, his wife and his daughter, that wouldn't have been possible because Cantillon wasn't in Paris in 1710 and he wasn't even married in 1715.

5:46So that would rule out this portrait of the Cantillon. It would have to have been in the 1730s before he died in 1734. His daughter was born in 1726 or thereabouts. So by 1733, she would have been about five to seven years old, and a five to seven year The 30-year-old girl actually, looking up the statistics, is just slightly taller than an adult sitting down in a chair. So that would be perfect lining it up that she would have been five to seven years old. At that point in the early 1730s, Marianne would have been in her early to mid-30s, and Richard would have been in his upper 40s.

6:40Fortunately, looking through the art literature on this artist, I was able to find that three authors in 1974 rejected the traditional dating and identification of this painting, that it wasn't 1715, it wasn't the artist and his family, it was somebody else. And Rosenfeld in 1982 suggests that the time of this painting must have been after 1729 because his style changed at that point and this painting reflects that new style. My contribution to that dating is rather bizarre, looking up French men's clothing trends.

7:30I found that after 1730 men started wearing a clasp around their stockings to hold them up. And so he's got that same clasp on his stocking so that the painting must have occurred after 1730. Now as far another economic indicator is the expense of this painting. This was done by the most prominent portrait artist in Paris at the time he had actually painted the King and Queen of England and all the prominent officials in Paris and the church and so forth. This is a massive painting. It's two meters wide and one and a half meters high.

8:17That should be a question right there, question mark right there. So it's life-size painting. It's got three individuals in it, and every time you add an individual, it becomes progressively more and more expensive. So instead of a $100 one-person painting becoming a $200 two-person painting, it would actually be $300. So it's very expensive, and you can't see it necessarily, but all of the hands are revealed in this painting. And the hands were the most difficult things to paint. The actual artist himself had to paint the faces and the hands. The background could be done by other people in the studio. So this was an enormously expensive painting.

9:03But of course Cantillon, at the time, was one of the richest private individuals in the world. So he could easily afford the best, the biggest, and the most accurate portrait. Now Marianne, his wife, is the cause for doubt really here. There's no actual things in either portrait that would absolutely reject one from being the other. The hair color is different, but of course she's an Irish girl in this painting, she's a Parisian madam in this painting, and Parisian wealthy women grayed their hair, even the daughter has gray hair, and of course the men at the time wore those elaborate wool Wigs, and at the time it was the style in Paris was if you were wealthy married woman with children you were supposed to take on a very mature appearance therefore the gray hair the type of makeup that she uses in the pose. For For example, yeah, this is the artist's daughter when she got married at age 25.

10:19And notice the sort of the posture, the gray hair, and the makeup as well, make her look considerably older than her 24 and a half years of age. But again, the general appearance of this woman versus the general appearance of this This Woman. It's hard to believe that they could be the same person. As a matter of fact, Cantillon's biographer Murphy rejected the whole idea. He said, Mary Anne Cantillon was a beautiful woman and this lady is ugly. He wouldn't even read the paper. But of course, there's a period of time between 1722 and 1732, let's say, where she would have aged, she would have gained weight.

11:05Of course, if you're a wealthy person living in Paris at the time, and you don't have to do any work, you're going to gain a lot of weight. Believe me, I think I must have gained 10 pounds in Paris in two weeks. And her life was very stressful, too. Her husband was charged with crimes. She gave birth to two children, one of whom died. and so she had a very stressful life other than not having to do any house cleaning. So we took that original photograph and did some photoshopping on it. We gave her back her brown hair and we tightened up her chin. So she looks a little younger, a little better there and if you look up a close up on this This Person.

11:54You see that she actually does look young and relatively beautiful, much more so than that image that you're given from far back. And the reason this is, is that the position that she's in creates an optical illusion. When you're given a profile image of somebody, you're given, you're seeing a lot of distinctive features of that person's face. If you're given a front-on version, the only thing you really see is the eyeballs, really concentrating on the eyeballs. So the profile image is very rare. Only presidents and kings on coins and prisoners who are in jails are you given a profile image.

12:41So you can see the distinctive features of that person, okay? So that's very rare. It emphasizes differences. In the frontal view, beauty, the perception of beauty is based on symmetry, skin tone and averageness. Symmetry is the fact that your eyes are basically lined up with one another, that the shape of your head is lined up fairly well, that one side is pretty much the same as the other side. In profile, you don't see any symmetry. And if you don't see symmetry and you see distinctions instead, rather than averageness, for example, a small nose is not so beautiful, considered beautiful, a large nose is not considered beautiful, an average-sized nose is considered beautiful.

13:36But with the profile image that she's in right here, there's no symmetry, therefore our brain says there's no beauty and if our brain tells us there's no beauty it tells us other words that the person is not beautiful maybe ugly and to highlight this profile thing we can look at Ruben's Venus in a mirror in the top part of the frame please this person this this image is in profile this image is is frontal. I asked a dozen people which version they thought was more beautiful. They all picked that one. This is a portrait of Elizabeth Bonaparte, the tri-view image of Elizabeth Bonaparte. You have the profile, you have the frontal, and you have the slightly turned.

14:30Went to the same 12 people, 10 people picked this one, two people picked that one, nobody let me pick that one. So I believe this research that I've read, maturity. Okay, the makeup on this lady is designed to make her look mature. The lips are thin rather than thick, the eyebrows are straight and large rather than rounded, and the eyes are small rather than Large. Mature images are of thin lips, straight eyebrows and small eyes for females. Thick lips, rounded eyebrows and large eyes are considered beautiful or attractive in females. So maturity is not viewed as attractive in females and oddly enough maturity in men is viewed as more attractive using some of these testing procedures.

15:32The issue of facial recognition, the ability to recognize one person as another is affected by things like illumination, the pose, facial expression, occlusions which are hidden features and all four work against our ability to recognize one versus the other. In addition, expressiveness. Most people express their emotions physically from this side of your face. Most people do not express emotion, thought, interest with this side of the face. I know this is weird, but there's actual research about this. This person is facing the best way for being expressive. This person is facing the worst way to be progressive.

16:19Now, this research is obviously very speculative and it gets much worse than that as I go through here. But one thing that I did that finally opened the door at the Louvre for a little bit of assistance is I emailed the curator who's in charge of this area, who had never responded to me in inquiries in the past, and I said, could you please tell me what the color of all their eyes are? I said, I think that they should all be blue, and she wrote me back, because Parisian eyes are generally all brown. Irish eyes, where Richard Cantillon and Marianne Cantillon and their daughter were all from Ireland.

17:10As a matter of fact, they were from the southwest coast of Ireland, where blue eyes is entirely is really dominant, whereas blue eyes are not common in Parisians or French from central France. So, and again, the wig here on this man is also called a banker's wig. And of course Cantillon was a banker. So, the evidence gets rather bizarre after this point. I think I'll just stop here and let the next person take over. Thank you very much.