Aline Chassériau

When Théodore Chassériau painted this in 1835 he was 16 years old and already the prize pupil of Ingres, and the calm girl in front of the dark wall is his younger sister, who sat for him at 13. For a long time the museum called her Adèle, the elder sister. Drawings of the family and a plain second look corrected that. Adèle was 25 in 1835, far too old to be this adolescent face, and the sitter is really Geneviève, known as Aline. Chassériau used his brothers and sisters as models constantly, and this portrait keeps almost to a single colour, brown against brown, with the pale young face the only thing that lifts clear of the dark.