The identities of both of these sitters is unknown, but the officer in the portrait above is dressed in a uniform of the royalist Légion de Mirabeau, a force raised in exile by the younger brother of the famous orator and leader during the early days of the French Revolution, Honoré comte Mirabeau. The regiment to which the uniform belongs is easy enough to identify as the Bourbon lily is everywhere you look; indeed, the gentleman with the striking nose portrayed here is bien fleurdelisé.
I haven't been able to identify the regiment belonging to the uniform worn in this portrait. But the two paintings look to be a pair - same format, same frame, same year of completion - and so it seems logical that it was royalist as well.
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Joseph-Marcellin Combette (26 April 1770, Nozeroy - 21 May 1840, Poligny), French painter. He studied with the Swiss painter Jean Wyrsch at the École des Beaux-Arts in Besançon, and then traveled to Paris, where he worked in the studio of the sculptor Claude Dijoux. Having returned to the Franche-Comté, by 1804 he was professor of drawing at the college of Poligny. He seems to have specialized in portraits, but spent much of his career on commissions for the church; he also produced some sculpture.
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| Painted on the back of one of the portraits. |
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