Jeune femme au turban

David painted this head around 1780, freshly back from years of study in Rome and not yet the severe painter of the Revolution he would become. It is a tete d'expression, an expressive head, the exercise the academy set its students to master one emotion and the fall of cloth, here a young woman glancing upward beneath a heavy folded turban. It was admired enough in his studio that his own pupils asked leave to copy it. Within a decade that studio would be the most influential in France, and David himself a leader of the Revolution. This small early study kept a quieter life, passing afterward through the collection of his most gifted pupil, Baron Gros, before it reached Cleveland.