Tre donne di Gand

This group portrait of three women from Ghent carried the name of Jacques-Louis David for a long time. He was the painter who had defined the art of the French Revolution and then served as Napoleon's premier painter, and a work of this authority seemed to belong to him. That attribution has since grown uncertain. Many scholars now give it to his circle or workshop rather than his own hand, and the question stays open. The Ghent connection points toward the last chapter of David's life, after Napoleon's fall, when he lived out his exile in Brussels, a short way from Ghent itself. Who the three sitters were has not come down to us. What has come down is his method: the plain neutral ground, the face recorded soberly, the refusal to prettify a sitter, held here whether the hand was his own or one he had trained to think like him.