Jean-Baptiste Isabey and His Daughter

In 1795 François Gérard was 25 and still making his name. His friend Jean-Baptiste Isabey, a painter of miniatures, helped him sell a large picture of Belisarius, the Byzantine general. This portrait became the thank-you. Gérard showed it at the Salon of 1796, Year V by the revolutionary calendar, and afterwards gave it to Isabey. He painted his friend at full length, in boots, hat in one hand, holding with the other the hand of his daughter Alexandrine, who was about four. Behind them a dog looks up at the pair from a sunlit doorway. The Belisarius has since been lost and is known only from an engraving, while the portrait stayed in the family. In 1852 the sitter's son, the painter Eugène Isabey, gave it to the Louvre, together with the self-portrait Jacques-Louis David had painted in 1794.