Madame de Verninac as Diana the Huntress
Joseph Chinard (1756-1813) · Model 1800, marble 1808
A young woman with tightly curled hair turns her head sharply to one side, an arrow held delicately between her fingers as she tests its point. Her tunic is fringed and pinned at the shoulder in the antique manner, and the whole bust sits on a small moulded pedestal signed Chinard of Lyon. She is Henriette de Verninac, born in 1780, playing the part of Diana the huntress preparing her arrows, a flattering disguise much loved by fashionable women of the Consulate. The twist of the neck and the lively fingers give the portrait an alertness that most neoclassical busts lack.
Chinard, the leading sculptor of Lyon, showed the model at the Salon of 1800 and the marble at the Salon of 1808. The sitter was the elder sister of the painter Eugene Delacroix, who also owned the famous portrait of her by David; she left the bust to her brother when she died in 1827, and it stayed in the family until the twentieth century. After passing through the David-Weill sale in 1974 and the London trade, it was bought by the Louvre in 1983.
Did You Know? The sitter is the sister of the painter Delacroix, who inherited this bust and kept it all his life.
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