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It is by his portraits that Largillière is esteemed. Effective as a portraitist of groups and able to achieve in single portraits grandeur or intimacy, depending on the circumstances, he remained impressively consistent in artistic quality. He was in his seventies when he portrayed so delicately and perceptively Elizabeth Throckmorton in her habit as a Blue Nun. Pale-complexioned, pensive, and felt as distanced from the world, she is also very much a living presence, with liquid eyes and scarlet mouth, the colour of which is almost startlingly vivid amid the austere white fabrics that enfold her.
Images of members of Catholic cloistered or semi-cloistered religious orders are numerous in post-Tridentine Europe. Rubens, Velázquez, and many of their followers painted imposing portraits of nuns. Philippe de Champaigne made a specialty of portraits of religious figures.
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