Giuseppina Grassini Playing Zaire

In 1804 Britain and France were at war again, and still one of the voices London paid to hear was Giuseppina Grassini, the Italian contralto Napoleon had taken to Paris after his victory at Marengo in 1800. She sang at the King's Theatre, the city's Italian opera house, through 1804 and 1805. Vigée Le Brun, the French portraitist, was working in London at the same time, and the museum in Rouen says she painted six portraits of the singer there. This one shows Grassini in costume as Zaira, heroine of a new opera based on Voltaire's tragedy Zaïre, a Christian-born captive in the sultan's palace in Jerusalem. That role explains the turban, the red shawl and the gown sewn with small gold stars. Vigée Le Brun still owned the canvas when she died in 1842, and in her will she left it to the Rouen museum.