Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson, marquise de Pompadour

By 1750 Madame de Pompadour had been the mistress of Louis XV for about five years, and she used painters like Boucher to shape how France saw her. This is often called the first portrait in Western art to show its sitter putting on makeup. She sits at her dressing table, a brush of rouge lifted toward her cheek, and turns to look straight out at us. Boucher kept almost everything in one narrow range of pale pink and white, so that the powder and paint on her skin rhyme with the paint on his canvas. He reworked the picture more than once, adding strips of fabric to widen a plain bust-length portrait into this fuller dressing-table scene, and a later hand rounded it off into an oval.