The Artist: Isabey was born in Nancy, where he studied with the painter Jean-Baptiste Charles Claudot (1733–1805), who also taught Jean-Baptiste Jacques Augustin (1759–1832; see
17.190.1120a, b) and Jean Antoine Laurent (1763–1832). He went to Paris in 1786 and received some patronage from Marie Antoinette; however, he rose to a preeminent role among the early-nineteenth-century French miniaturists through his pupil Hortense de Beauharnais (1783–1837). She introduced him to Napoléon I, who was her stepfather and brother-in-law. Isabey became his court painter and had to maintain a number of studio assistants to help him provide the great number of miniatures of the emperor which he was called on to produce. His earlier works were done on ivory, but in the second decade of the nineteenth century he adopted the new technique of painting on paper stretched over sheets of metal. This enabled him to work on a larger scale and contributed to the fluent brushwork and luminosity of his later portrait miniatures.
The Miniature: This work was received at The Met as the portrait of an unknown woman by an unidentified artist. Bodo Hofstetter (1995) has drawn attention to a version by another hand in the Musée de l'horlogerie, Geneva, which established the present work's authorship and the identity of the sitter. The Geneva version (
L’âge d’or du petit portrait, Paris, 1995, pp. 202–3, ill. in color) is a portrait of Mme Isabey by Henriette Rath (1773–1856). It varies in a number of details from The Met’s miniature: for example, the format is oval (3 1/8 x 2 3/4 in. [80 x 69 mm]) rather than circular, the table for sewing materials is in front of the sitter rather than to her right, and a black box has replaced the open basket of cottons. There are also subtle modifications in the sitter's features, hairstyle, and costume.
The Geneva version is inscribed on the reverse by Henriette Rath:
Portrait de / Madame Isabey / première femme / la tête d’après nature / peint par H. Rath / copie d’après Isabey. This inscription was evidently written in or after 1829, when Isabey married for the second time. It indicates that Mme Rath based her copy on the present miniature but painted Mme Isabey's features from a fresh sitting from the life. Henriette Rath was a pupil of Isabey from 1798, when she first came from Geneva to visit Paris. The Geneva miniature is ascribed to the period of her early association with Isabey.
Isabey married Jeanne Laurice de Salienne in 1791. His portrait of her in mourning, dated 1790, is in the Musée du Louvre (
L’âge d’or du petit portrait, Paris, 1995, pp. 316–17, ill. in color). The Met and Geneva portraits appear from the costume and hairstyle to date about 1796–1800. If Henri Bouchot (
La miniature française, 2nd ed., Paris, 1910, p. 268) was correct in giving Mme Isabey's age as twenty-five before her marriage, she continued to look remarkably youthful in these portraits made some eight or so years later. She died in 1829, and Rose Maistre became Isabey's second wife in the same year.
[2016; adapted from Reynolds and Baetjer 1996]