Bildnis des Alphonse Leroy

David painted this in 1783, and the sitter was no random dignitary. Alphonse Leroy was a well-known Paris obstetrician, and he had delivered the painter's own first child. So David gives him a warm, almost domestic treatment rather than the cold marble of his later Revolutionary portraits. Leroy leans on a closed medical book, an old treatise on the illnesses of women, and beside him on the desk sits an oil lamp he had invented himself. The rich, glowing detail comes from a trip David had just made to Flanders, where he studied the Flemish painters up close. He shows Leroy turning toward you, caught as if you'd walked in on him at his desk in the middle of a thought.