Study of a Woman from Nature

Marie-Denise Villers signed this on the stone ledge and dated it in the revolutionary calendar, Year Ten, and in 1802 it hung at the Salon in the Louvre under a plain title, a study of a woman from nature. Later it was renamed Portrait of Madame Soustras, after a young woman who went on to serve as a chambermaid to the Empress Josephine. Her son wrote that she had posed only for the hands, and Villers is said to have painted the face from her own, in a mirror. Yet the face resembles another portrait said to show Madame Soustras, so the question stays open. The woman is tying a white slipper, and the picture's travels suit her. Bequeathed by the painter's husband, it spent decades in ministries and a town hall, and from 2004 to 2021 it was lent to the International Shoe Museum at Romans-sur-Isère.