Portrait of Antoine-Denis Chaudet

The painter and her sitter were married. Around 1802 Jeanne-Élisabeth Chaudet portrayed her husband, Antoine-Denis Chaudet, one of the leading French sculptors of the Napoleonic years, the man who would carve the official image of Napoleon that spread through the empire in marble and bronze. She had trained partly under him before they married, and had also studied with Jacques-Louis David, the dominant French painter of the era. Her own reputation was built mainly on tender scenes of children and animals, so the grave portrait of a fellow professional was a change of register for her. It is an unusual object in itself: the portrait of an artist made by his own wife. It dates from the Consulate, when Napoleon governed France but had not yet crowned himself emperor. Chaudet the sculptor died in 1810, and his widow went on painting and exhibiting at the Paris Salon for decades.