Gérard, a student of David, was official painter to Empress Joséphine; the sitter was a celebrated beauty, captured in Vigée Lebrun’s youthful portrait from 1783, also at The Met. In 1802, her affair with the statesman Talleyrand was sufficiently scandalous that Napoleon demanded they marry; neither was particularly faithful, however, and, by the time this portrait was painted two years later, they had separated. Thus, this is not a pendant to The Met’s two portraits of Talleyrand. Gérard’s brush revels in details of the highly fashionable interior: contrasting sun and fire light from the novel chimney installed beneath a window, the diaphanous dress, and the paisley shawl—a modish accessory, but also a nod to the sitter’s birth near Pondicherry, in colonial India.
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