François-Hubert Drouais

In April 1763 the marquise de Pompadour, Louis XV's most powerful mistress and the unofficial arbiter of French taste, sat for the fashionable Paris portraitist François-Hubert Drouais. He painted her head from life on a small, separate piece of canvas. She died the following spring, at 43, and Drouais finished the picture around her, sewing that little canvas of her face into a large full-length and completing the gown and the room in his studio. He signed it in May 1764, a month after she was gone.

The portrait shows her seated in a fine embroidered dress at her tambour frame, a needlework stand, with a book at her side, a picture of cultivated leisure. Where an earlier generation had dressed court ladies as antique goddesses, Drouais liked to place his sitters in everyday guises, and here he gives France's most calculating courtier the air of a quiet afternoon at home.

That portrait came at the height of a busy career spent painting the great of the age. Drouais worked for both of the king's famous mistresses, Pompadour and later Madame du Barry, and he had a particular touch with children, dressing his young sitters as little shepherds and gardeners. He died in Paris in 1775.