Dantan mixed Neoclassical training with interests in caricature, phrenology, and fashionable society. Today he is best known as a caricaturist, although straightforward portraits comprise at least half of his output. Occasionally, they may have a mischievous undertone, but this young woman has an appreciable semblance of wit and sparkle, even as she flaunts the latest coiffure. Dubbed "à la Hortense Mancini," the style was viewed as revivalistic, harking back to the seventeenth century and the glamorous Hortense, who was a niece of Cardinal Mazarin. The plaster model for this bust is not among the trove of those by Dantan in the Musée Carnavalet, Paris.