Portrait de Charlotte du Val d’Ognes

For much of the 20th century this was one of the treasures of the Metropolitan Museum, admired as a work by Jacques-Louis David, the great painter of the French Revolution. Then the doubts began. It had first been shown at the Paris Salon of 1801, a year David boycotted, and by 1951 the museum admitted the famous name might be wrong. Only in 1996 was it convincingly given to Marie-Denise Villers, a young woman painter trained in that same Paris art world and largely forgotten since. The sitter, Charlotte du Val d'Ognes, sits drawing by a window whose pane is cracked, letting in a hard light that falls across her white dress and steady, unhurried gaze.