La Vestale

A vestal was one of Rome's priestesses who guarded the sacred flame of the city and swore to stay unmarried through decades of service. David painted this quiet, veiled version of one in the early 1780s, when he was building his name in Paris on subjects pulled straight from antiquity. It was the calm before a very different decade. Within a few years he would be painting Revolutionary martyrs and voting, as a deputy, for the king's death. Here there is none of that. Just a young woman in white, her head slightly raised, softened by the thin veil across her hair. The picture stayed in French hands for generations and has lived in a private American collection since the 1980s.