Young Woman with a Turban

David painted this head around 1780, freshly back from years of study in Rome and not yet the severe painter of the Revolution he would become. It is a tete d'expression, an expressive head, the exercise the academy set its students to master one emotion and the fall of cloth, here a young woman glancing upward beneath a heavy folded turban. It was admired enough in his studio that his own pupils asked leave to copy it. Within a decade that studio would be the most influential in France, and David himself a leader of the Revolution. This small early study kept a quieter life, passing afterward through the collection of his most gifted pupil, Baron Gros, before it reached Cleveland.