Madame de Pastoret and Her Son

Jacques-Louis David painted this portrait of Madame de Pastoret and her son in 1791–92, in the middle of the Revolution and at the height of his fame, when he was at work on the unfinished Oath of the Tennis Court. He painted remarkably few private portraits, and he kept this one — apparently an uncommissioned gift of friendship — in his studio until his death, so it escaped the dispersal of his works after Waterloo. The sitter, the wife of the marquis de Pastoret, belonged to the reformist nobility, and the picture quietly registers the domestic face of a decade otherwise given to public allegory. The painting is held in the Art Institute of Chicago.