Anne-Marie-Louise Thélusson, contessa di Sorcy

David painted this young woman in 1790, the year after the fall of the Bastille, as France was pulling itself apart. She was Anne-Marie-Louise Thélusson, married into wealth and the daughter of a rich Geneva banker, exactly the moneyed world the Revolution was beginning to turn on. David gives her the severe, stripped-down clarity he was making fashionable, a plain background and a steady gaze, none of the powder and frills of the old court manner. Within three years the painter himself would be a leading revolutionary, voting for the execution of the king and staging the new regime's public festivals. He signed and dated the portrait along the arm of her chair.