Antoinette Gabrielle Danton

In February 1793 the French Revolution was at full pitch, and Georges Danton, one of its loudest voices, was away with the armies on the Belgian front. While he was gone his wife, Antoinette Gabrielle, died giving birth to what would have been their fourth child. He came home to find her already buried. By some accounts he had the grave reopened so a sculptor could take a cast of her face, days after her death, and that death mask still survives. This portrait belongs to the same year. She is shown plainly, dark-eyed and direct, the daughter of a café-keeper rather than an aristocrat, the kind of sitter the new order preferred. Danton himself had little more than a year left, and went to the guillotine in the spring of 1794.