Study of Olympe Pelissier as Judith

The woman who sat for this head was Olympe Pélissier, and the study is inscribed Rome 1830. Horace Vernet was then in charge of the French Academy in Rome, and he was preparing a large canvas of Judith, the biblical widow who saves her town by beheading the Assyrian general Holofernes. Olympe posed for the heroine, and a young man named Federico Ricci for the general. The finished picture was shown at the Paris Salon of 1831 and now hangs in the museum of fine arts at Pau, in southwestern France. Olympe was already well known in Paris as a beauty and an artists' model. Around this time she had a brief affair with the young Balzac, who was later said to have drawn on her for Foedora, the cold, unattainable woman of his novel The Wild Ass's Skin. In the 1830s she met the composer Gioachino Rossini, and in 1846, after the death of his first wife, the singer Isabella Colbran, she married him. They lived together in Paris until his death in 1868.