Young Woman with a Turban

A young woman looks out from beneath a loosely wound turban, her face framed by soft shadow so that the eyes carry the whole picture, a tender and unpretentious likeness from the early career of Jacques-Louis David. Painted around 1780, before the revolutionary canvases that made his fame, the portrait shows him learning restraint and clarity from the classical past, yet still treating a sitter with an intimacy rare in his grander works. The simple pose and quiet palette point toward the severe Neoclassicism he would soon make the official style of France.