Portrait of Madame Du Barry

Seven years before this was painted, Louis XV died of smallpox and his last mistress was out of Versailles within a day and shut up in an abbey east of Paris. By 1781 Jeanne du Barry was back at Louveciennes, the château above the Seine the king had given her, living quietly and still rich, and the painter who came out to her was 26 and had been working for Marie Antoinette for three years. Du Barry is shown in a straw hat and a loose muslin dress, her head turned and her lips parted as though she were talking to someone just outside the picture. She ordered two versions of it, one for each of the men in her life at the time. The panel in Philadelphia is the one made for Henry Seymour, an English gentleman who lived a few miles from her gate.