Self-Portrait with Artist's Father

Constance Mayer painted this in 1801 and sent it to the Paris Salon, in a France still being reshaped by the recent Revolution. She uses the picture to make a claim. She stands beside her father, who points toward a marble bust of Raphael, as if handing his daughter into the great tradition of art, with fragments of antique sculpture set around them. She has dressed herself in plain, high-waisted white, the Grecian style that was the height of Revolutionary fashion and a pointed rejection of the powdered excess of the old court. Not long after, she began working alongside the painter Pierre-Paul Prud'hon, whose studio and life she would share for the next two decades.