Portrait de la marquise d'Orvilliers

David painted this in 1790, with the Revolution barely a year old and the artist himself already in the thick of it. Soon he would sit in the Convention and vote for the king's death. None of that shows here. His sitter is Jeanne Robertine Rilliet, married into the d'Orvilliers family and a daughter of a Genevan banker, and he painted her sister the same year as a companion piece. He posed her the way a Roman matron sits in an ancient statue he admired, the seated Agrippina in the Capitoline in Rome, one arm folded, the body still and square to us. The blue sash and the plain wall keep everything quiet, so all the attention falls on her level, unhurried gaze.