扇を持つ婦人、画家の妻

Roslin painted his wife in 1768, and she was a painter too. Marie-Suzanne Giroust worked in pastel and had been admitted to the French Royal Academy in her own right, at a time when very few women were. He shows her in Bolognese dress, half hidden behind a fine black silk veil, with white lace and pink silk beneath it. When the picture was shown at the Salon of 1769, Diderot, the sharpest critic of the day, called it very piquant. The detail people return to is the closed fan she holds against her cheek. In the language of fans that gesture read as a quiet message of affection, sent here from the sitter to the man at the easel, who happened to be her husband. She died four years after he finished it.