Portrait of a young girl

The short cropped hair here would have looked pointedly modern in the mid-1790s. It is the coiffure à la Titus, a Roman-style cut named for an emperor, and in the years just after the Revolution young Parisians wore it as a sign of republican taste. This is one of the earliest paintings to record it. Pierre-Narcisse Guérin was barely out of his own training when he made it, and the plainness is deliberate: a bare background, cool measured colour, the girl turned toward you without any setting or story to explain her. Guérin would later run one of the most important studios in Paris, teaching both Géricault and Delacroix the discipline they would spend their careers straining against.