He was a scion of a family of painters. His father was the portrait painter François de Troy (1645–1730). His father was his first teacher. After he failed to win the Prix de Rome, he went at his father's expense to Italy from 1699 to 1706. He stayed initially in Rome, where he was given a room at the French Academy. He also visited northern Italian cities. He was at the same time aggregated and admitted to the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture in July 1708, presumably on the strength of his composition Niobe and her Children (Musée Fabre) but certainly not without a little help of his father who was then the director of that institution.Everett Fahy, Jayne Wrightsman, The Wrightsman Pictures, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2005, pp. 162–166
