Portrait of Marguerite-Charlotte David
by DAVID, Jacques-Louis, Oil on canvas, 72 x 63 cm
The painting represents the wife of the artist. In Napoleonic Paris David and his wife were hardly a splendid or striking couple. The English novelist Fanny Burney called Madame David ‘a woman of no sort of elegance … and if she ever possessed any beauty, it had deserted her at an early period’, but in compensation she was clever, shrewd and penetrating, yet prone to sarcasm.