A woman of her time. The elegant woman, sitting at home, writes to her children on the eve of the French Revolution. The beautiful stranger stares at us, still absorbed in her task. Her clothing reflects a new fashion tending towards simplicity: a pearl white frock coat, a transparent veil on the neck and the charlotte on her natural powdered hair. She embodies, in this Age of Enlightenment, the modern, liberated and cultured woman of the living room. This portrait is made by a female artist, Adélaïde Labille-Guiard. In this work he displays a prodigious ability to render materials: the reflections of the satin and the opacity of the wood of the desk covered with green felt contrast with a neutral background.

Adélaïde Labille-Guiard is one of the most famous portrait painters of the late 18th century. She is also a renowned miniaturist and pastelist after an apprenticeship with the great master Quentin de La Tour. She was admitted to the Académie de Saint-Luc, a painting academy, when she was just twenty. She then entered the Académie Royale de peinture et de sculpture at the same time as her rival Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, to whom she is often compared. He acquired his fame thanks to the portraits he made first for the daughters of Louis XV and then, after the Revolution, for those of fourteen deputies of the National Assembly, including that of Robespierre. In addition, the artist fought to improve the status of painters by creating her own art school for girls.

© Musée des beaux-arts de Quimper.