Portrait of Madame Adélaide Pastoret

David began this portrait in 1791, in the short window when the Revolution still looked like it might settle into a calm constitutional order. Adélaïde de Pastoret, a young noblewoman, sits sewing beside the cradle of her baby son, exactly the picture of composed domestic life the moment seemed to promise. It was never finished. Over the next year David moved sharply to the radical side, voted with the men who would send the king to the scaffold, and broke with the Pastorets, who were arrested or fled. He simply put the canvas down. Her right hand is still empty, the needle and thread he meant to paint never added, and patches of bare underpaint show where the picture stops.