Madame Pasteur, née Madeleine Alexandre (1773-1841)

She is dressed in the fashion that swept France in the late 1790s, a high-waisted gown of white muslin inspired by ancient statues, with a green scarf, and Gros paints her seated with her arms folded and a single curl falling over her forehead. The Louvre dates the portrait to around 1795 to 1800, when she was in her twenties. Look at the jewellery, which earned the picture a place in the Louvre's 2008 book on the jewels in its collections. A thin gold chain carries an enamelled pendant in the shape of a lozenge, and pins shaped like arrows are pushed into her hair.

Of Madeleine Alexandre herself little is recorded beyond her dates, 1773 to 1841, and her married name. Gros spent most of those years in Italy, and the record does not say where she sat for him. The picture stayed with her descendants. In 1948 her great-grandson Charles Pasteur gave it to the Louvre through the Society of Friends of the Louvre, keeping it for the rest of his life, and it reached the museum in 1962, the year after he died.