Portrait of Suzanne Le Peletier de Saint-Fargeau

The young woman in muslin was once the most famous orphan in France. In January 1793, on the eve of the king's execution, her father Michel Le Peletier — a nobleman who had himself voted for that execution — was stabbed by a royalist in revenge. The Revolution made him a martyr, and David painted the dead man as a public icon. His daughter Suzanne, then 11, was adopted by the nation and named its own child. By 1804 the ground had shifted again. Napoleon ruled, David worked for him, and this was one of the few private portraits he still accepted. He painted Suzanne at 22, the year of her engagement to the cousin she would marry in 1806: a fashionable young woman in a soft black cashmere stole, dark curls loose over large dark eyes, and no sign of the public grief she had been born into.