Portrait of the Marquise d'Orvilliers
Jacques-Louis David (1748-1825) · 1790
A young woman of about eighteen sits in a Louis the Sixteenth armchair covered in blue and looks away to her right with a calm, faintly amused expression. The chair is seen from the side but she has turned toward you, resting her folded arms on its curved back. She wears a black dress with a white muslin fichu, a broad red sash and a black lace shawl, and her dark curls are tied with a red ribbon. The setting is nothing but a grey wall; David has spent everything on the face, the hands and the textures of cloth. The signature and the date 1790 are at the lower left.
Jeanne Robertine Rilliet came from banking families of Paris and Geneva and had married Jean Louis Tourteau d'Orvilliers in February 1789; the portrait was probably ordered to mark the wedding and delivered in 1790. Her husband rallied to the Bourbons after 1815, and she became countess and then marquise d'Orvilliers before dying in Paris in 1862 at ninety. The picture passed through her daughter's family and was bequeathed to the Louvre in 1923.
Did You Know? The sitter lived to ninety and only became a marquise in 1822, more than thirty years after this portrait.
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