Portrait of Madame Récamier
Jacques-Louis David (1748-1825) · 1800
Juliette Récamier reclines barefoot on a Roman-style daybed and turns her head over her shoulder toward you with quiet composure. She wears a simple white dress in the fashion of the Directoire, her dark hair cropped short and bound with a ribbon, and the room around her is almost empty: a tall bronze lamp stand at the left, a small footstool, and a bare grey wall. The canvas is wide, nearly two and a half metres, and most of it is deliberately left as space. Look closely at the wall and the daybed and you will see that the paint is thin and sketchy, with the ground showing through, while the face is finished with great care.
The picture was commissioned in 1800 by the sitter, then twenty-two years old and the most celebrated hostess in Paris, and by her husband, the banker Jacques Récamier. David began it in the spring and had abandoned it by the end of the year. The story usually told is that the sitter grew impatient and asked David's pupil François Gérard to paint her instead, and that David replied that painters have their caprices too and kept the unfinished canvas. The catalogue of his studio sale in 1826 praised the ease of the pose, the elegance of the dress and above all the likeness, and judged that this sketch could stand comparison with his most highly finished works. Notice how the horizontals of the daybed and the vertical of the lamp frame the curve of her body.
David kept the canvas until his death in exile in Brussels in 1825; from 1820 it was stored at the Paris home of his pupil Antoine-Jean Gros. It was bought for the royal collection of Charles the Tenth after the studio sale and entered the Louvre in January 1827. The plain wall, the bare feet and the antique furniture made the image a lasting emblem of the taste of the years around 1800, and its unfinished state now reads as one of its strengths.
Did You Know? The daybed she reclines on gave its name to a type of sofa that is still called a récamier.
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