Portrait of Cooper Penrose

In 1802 the Peace of Amiens briefly reopened the Channel, and travellers shut out of France for years poured into Paris. One of them was Cooper Penrose, an Irish Quaker and a wealthy timber merchant from Cork, who came specifically to sit for Jacques-Louis David, then the most sought-after painter in Europe and lately Napoleon's own. David gives him almost nothing to hide behind. A plain wall, a dark coat, no emblems of rank, the light gathered on the face and hands. In one corner he dated the picture not by the Christian year but in Latin, as the tenth year of the French Republic, the revolutionary calendar David himself had helped bring in a decade earlier.