Description:
half-length portrait of a woman, brown hair in tight bun with curls around her head, wearing a white empire style dress and white wool shawl, seated in a wood chair with head facing forward and body turned toward proper left against a plain dark background; costume/uniform
Label Text:
Painted in 1804, the year Napoleon was crowned Emperor of France, this portrait depicts the thirty-six-year-old Charlotte-Félicité Grouchy, wife of the doctor and literary figure Pierre-Jean-George Cabanis. It exemplifies aspects of neoclassical portraiture in the classicizing elements of the sitter’s apparel and in the sculptural quality of her form: she appears almost as an antique marble statue come to life.
Madame Cabanis is shown dressed in the latest fashion of the time, inspired by Greek and Roman antiquity. Her shawl, called a schall turc (Turkish shawl), is ivory wool with a narrow, decorative floral border, which is worn over an Empire-waisted white gown.
Link to share this object record:
https://museums.fivecolleges.edu/detail.php?t=objects&type=ext&id_number=SC+1956.19 |
