Marie-Éléonore Godefroid

At Versailles there is a portrait of Madame de Staël, the writer Napoleon had banished from Paris. It was painted in 1818, the year after she died, for her friend Madame Récamier, and it repeats a composition by François Gérard, the leading portraitist in France. The hand that painted it was Godefroid's.

She had joined Gérard's studio around 1805, and by 1812 she was living in his household and running the place. Work of that kind is easy to lose. She made replicas of his portraits, among them the official likenesses of Louis XVIII and Charles X that the government ordered for public buildings, and a replica travels under the name of the man who invented the composition.

Her own career ran alongside it. She had grown up inside the Louvre, where her father Ferdinand-Joseph Godefroid had lodgings as a restorer of the royal pictures, and she taught drawing and music at Madame Campan's boarding school for girls before leaving in 1795 to paint full time. Between 1800 and 1847 she showed 19 times at the Paris Salon and took medals in 1812 and 1824. The picture that made her name was a group portrait of Marshal Ney's three sons, exhibited in 1810. She was still sending work to the Salon at 69, and died in Paris two years later.