Rose-Adélaïde Ducreux

At the Salon of 1791, the first one opened to artists outside the royal Academy, a self-portrait of a young woman went up on the walls of the Louvre. Rose-Adélaïde Ducreux, then about 30, showed herself life-size beside a harp, in a striped silk gown, on a canvas nearly two metres tall. Before the Revolution she could not have exhibited there at all, because neither she nor her father belonged to the Academy. That year the two of them made their Salon debut together.

Her father and teacher was Joseph Ducreux, a portrait painter who had worked for Marie Antoinette and is remembered today for his grimacing, laughing self-portraits. The harp in her picture belonged to her real life. She played and composed music, and she was known as a musician as well as a painter. She kept showing at the Salon through the 1790s, but she never signed her pictures, and several were later attributed to better-known men, among them Jacques-Louis David.

In 1802 she sailed to the French colony of Saint-Domingue, today's Haiti, and married a naval administrator there. She died of yellow fever that July, two days after her father died in Paris.