Autoportrait à la harpe

Ducreux painted this life-size self-portrait in 1791, and the date matters. Two years into the French Revolution, the official Salon had just been thrown open to artists outside the royal Academy, which had kept most women out, and she seized the moment, showing this alongside her father, Marie Antoinette's portraitist. She presents herself standing at a harp, mid-chord, in a shimmering silk gown, poised and completely in command of the room. There is not a hint in it of the upheaval outside, with the king already a near-prisoner. Ducreux would leave a small, admired body of work and die young, of yellow fever on the island of Saint-Domingue in 1802, at 40.