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By the end of the 1680s Largillière received regular orders from the richer bourgeois of Paris. In 1689 he received a new type of commission, for one of the portrait-groups which the City of Paris caused to be executed to commemorate certain solemn occasions. In this case the theme was the banquet given by the Échevins to the King when he made his first formal visit to the Hôtel de Ville, as a gesture of forgiveness to the city for their part in the Fronde. Unfortunately, the painting was destroyed at the Revolution, but is known from several sketches.
Seven years later Largillière executed a second commission of the same kind of which the finished picture survives. It was ordered by the city for the church of Saint-Geneviève to commemorate the intervention of the patron saint to end a drought in 1694. In this composition the artist has combined northern and southern methods. In the poses and draperies of the lower figures Largillière follows the portrait convention with which he had already scored such success; but in its general conception the composition is an adaptation of a much-used formula for Baroque altarpieces in which saints are replaced by the Échevins and the Virgin by St Geneviève.
In this painting portraiture is blended with religious art, in a whole which is one of the most completely Baroque work of the period. Largillière looks not only back to Barocci but forward to Tiepolo.
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