Portrait of a Young Woman in White, c. 1798 by Jacques-Louis David
$100.00
A pale-skinned woman wearing a filmy white gown sits sideways on a wooden chair in front of a slate-gray wall in this vertical portrait painting. With her body angled to our right, her shins are cut off by the bottom corner of the painting, and she gazes back over her other shoulder, to our left. Her head is tipped toward that shoulder, and she looks into the distance with charcoal-gray eyes below dark brows. Her cheeks are flushed and her small, peach lips are closed. Her black hair is braided in a single horizontal plait above wispy fringe that frames her face and curls down the back of her neck. The low-cut neckline of her ivory-white dress is sheer across her chest, revealing her breasts. The fabric is gathered under a thin band just under her bust, and it drapes down from there. The short sleeve we can see, on her right arm, is tied with two tassels hanging from either end of a string. Her hands rest in her lap, with her left hand, farther from us, on a silky, radish-red cloth that drapes over that knee and around her back. The rest of the cloth is piled on a narrow wooden table edged with gold at the small of her back. The chair on which she sits has a simple wooden panel as the back rest, and the seat is upholstered in fabric with shiny and matte black stripes. Tiny gold bosses line the edge of the chair near the cushion. The background behind her gradually darkens from slate gray at the top of the canvas to a dark charcoal near her legs.