Portrait of a Young Woman

The Attribution: The miniature entered The Met attributed to a French painter known as Mortier due to close similarities with another miniature signed "Mortier An 3me" (1794/1795) that serves as a pendant with an identical format and frame (see 25.106.15). Nathlie Lemoine-Bouchard (2003) concurred with this attribution. The handling of the paint and drawing are comparable if not absolutely identical. If the assumption is kept that both miniatures are by the same hand, then these pendants are the basis for attributing other works to Mortier, whose life details remain otherwise undocumented. Certainly the two miniatures were associated at an early date, if not from their inception, as indicated by the matching frames and hairwork on the reverses. Surely the two colors of hair used for this decoration would deliberately evoke the two sitters’ marriage, linking one object to the other.

In 1952, Leo R. Schidlof (unpublished opinion) proposed this miniature as an unsigned work of Jean Antoine Laurent. Although Bodo Hofstetter (1995) did not agree with this attribution, it is supported by comparison with a miniature of a young man carving his initials on a tree (Bléhaut collection, Bourg-Argental) signed with Laurent’s initials and dated 1791.[1] A far more detailed record of Laurent’s life survives. Born in Baccarat, he became a pupil of Jean François Durand (b. 1731) and of Jean-Baptiste Charles Claudot (1733–1805). He began to exhibit at the Paris Salon in 1791, and was subsequently patronized by Empress Joséphine, Queen Hortense, Louis XVIII, and the duchess of Berry. He died of apoplexy, allegedly brought on by the announcement that he had been made a chevalier of the Légion d’Honneur in 1832.

The Work: Although its attribution is contested and the sitter may never be identified, Amelia Rauser has recently proposed an extremely compelling cultural context for understanding this portrait miniature.[2] The horizontal format allows the sitter to be staged in a natural setting, continuing Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778)’s call to return to nature. Prior to the French Revolution this aesthetic was given aristocratic and royal expression by Marie Antoinette and many sitters to Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun, whose portraits popularized white muslin dresses and straw hats (see 54.182). Rauser notes the sitter’s blonde hair and two kinds of Madras fabric, one tied at her waist, the other probably a shawl that serves here to cushion her arm. Both fashion statements speak specifically to an especially innovative moment of sartorial expression in the immediate aftermath of the so-called Reign of Terror (1792–1794), the bloodiest phase of the Revolution. Together, as Rauser posits, they foreground the sitter’s racialized whiteness by deliberately evoking a contrast—or even a play on the image of—the enslaved women of the French colonies, whose forced labor produced not only sugar but also the cotton from which such popular muslin were made for French domestic consumption.

Regarding the sitter’s blonde hair, it is possible that this is natural; however, Rauser points to the short-lived but extreme vogue around 1795 for wearing blonde wigs, led by Teresa de Cabarrus, known as Madame Tallien (1773–1835). A nineteenth-century lithograph after a portrait miniature of her in a blonde wig from 1794 by Jean-Baptiste Isabey (1767–1855) is remarkably similar (see fig. 1 above). Tallien was a leading figure in the so-called incroyables et merveilleuses (incredible and marvelous ones) of the late 1790s who responded to contemporary political events with often controversial sartorial expression. Elizabeth Amann has outlined Parisian fascination around 1795 with blonde wigs, notably on the stage, with some six plays produced about the subject in less than three months in the fall of 1794.[3] These included Louis-Benoît Picard’s La perruque blonde, Charles-Augustin de Bassompierre Sewrin’s comedy La blonde et la brune, ou les deux n’en font qu’une, and Joseph Aude’s Perruques de toutes les couleurs. The same season, the theater critic known as Henrion published Histoires secrètes de toutes les perruques blondes de Paris, in which he argued for which playwright had originated a recurrent plotline of brunettes disguised in fashionable blonde wigs beguiling lawyers, suitors, and fathers. As frequently occurred in French fashion, actual women’s dress followed the theater, with the blonde wig’s frisson in public further fueled by the rumor the precious human hair came from recent victims of the guillotine.[4] The reverse of the miniature is glazed to reveal an ivory back supporting decoration in blonde and brown human hair, shaped and woven to represent pansies, leaves, and a bowknot. Above all it suggests the relationship between the two sitters who were presumably married, but it is impossible to determine whose natural hair color has been represented by the artist.

Blondeness alone is insufficient to argue for the deliberate foregrounding of the sitter’s racialized whiteness; however, as Rauser argues, in such portraits it functions in conjunction with the role of Madras in European women’s fashion in the 1790s. This brightly dyed and patterned fabric deliberately evoked French colonies in the West Indies and quite specifically the enslaved and freed African women who had accompanied their white dresses with Madras wrappings since the 1780s.[5] Paintings by Agostino Brunias and a portrait by François Malépart de Beaucourt document various modes of use for the fabric in the West Indies during this period (figs. 2 and 3). But the connection was not coincidental. Madras itself was, in fact, deeply entangled in the transatlantic, triangular slave trade: European merchants secured it in India (Madras is the former name of the Indian city of Chennai in Tamil Nadu), but because of European protective tariffs it was introduced in West Africa where it was exchanged for enslaved men and women as well as sold in the West Indies. It is this cumulative, global trajectory documented in the images by Brunias, Malépart, and rare images such as The Met’s miniature that record the citation of this fashion back in Paris. As Rauser has documented, these African women’s Madras headscarfs, waistbands, and other punctuations of color to the otherwise white, neoclassical dress was picked up briefly around 1795 by the most fashionable Parisian society, precisely in those avant-garde spheres with women wearing blonde wigs. She notes that to evoke eighteenth-century associations with “changeability and lusty hedonism” that undercut social norms even as it could function misogynistically.[6] Rather than try to appear as African women, of course, these Parisians actually doubled down on their own claims to whiteness through the obvious contrast between their makeup, skin color, and the origins of their dress. In so doing, however, the very material and modes of production for those white dresses, too, was unmasked. While early imports of white muslin were from India, by the 1790s the industrialized processing of cotton had rapidly accelerated the role of enslaved labor in the West Indies to meet demand across Europe. The result was that by the 1780s the majority of the world’s cotton was produced through enslaved labor and each year some 30,000 enslaved people arrived in Saint-Domingue (present day Haiti) alone.[7]

While we cannot know the specificity of this unknown sitter’s relationship to the slave trade, in coded ways her dress announces the complacency and indeed reliance of eighteenth-century European fashion that was typically left disguised or unacknowledged.

David Pullins 2020

[1] Leo R. Schidlof, The Miniature in Europe, Graz, 1964, vol. I, p. 471; vol. IV, pl. 338, fig. 688.
[2] This entry is heavily reliant on Amelia Rauser, The Age of Undress. Art, Fashion, and the Classical Ideal in the 1790s, New Haven, 2020, pp. 133–34, 139–45. We are grateful to Amelia Rauser for her willingness to allow her work to guide much of the content of this entry.
[3] See Elizabeth Amann, “Blonde Trouble: Women in Wigs in the Wake of Thermidor,” Fashion Theory, vol. 13, no. 3 (2009), pp. 299–324; Elizabeth Amann, Dandyism in the Age of Revolution: The Art of the Cut, Chicago, 2015, pp. 59–82.
[4] Rauser 2020, p. 133
[5] Rauser 2020, pp. 139–45
[6] Rauser 2020, p. 145.
[7] Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History, New York, 2014, p. 94; Rauser 2020, p. 139.

Mrs. Louis V. Bell (until 1925)

New York. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. "European Miniatures in The Metropolitan Museum of Art," November 5, 1996–January 5, 1997, no. 91.

New York. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. "In Miniature," August 29–December 28, 2014, no catalogue.

Bodo Hofstetter. Letter to Katharine Baetjer. June 19, 1995, calls it certainly not by Laurent, but of the period.

Graham Reynolds with the assistance of Katharine Baetjer. European Miniatures in The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Exh. cat., The Metropolitan Museum of Art. New York, 1996, pp. 10, 113–14, 150, no. 91, colorpl. 91 and ill. p. 113, state that the attribution to Laurent "seems to be borne out by comparing this miniature with that of a young man carving his initials on a tree, signed with Laurent's initial and dated 1791" (Bléhaut collection, Bourg-Argental).

Nathalie Lemoine-Bouchard. Letter to Katharine Baetjer. November 24, 2003, rejects the attribution to Laurent, but suggests it is by Mortier, who made a pendant.

Amelia Rauser. The Age of Undress: Art, Fashion, and the Classical Ideal in the 1790s. New Haven, 2020, pp. 133–34, 166–67, ill. p. 166 and fig. 117 (color, overall and detail), argues that the sitter's blonde hair paired with the madras cloth tied around her waist are a representation of racialized whiteness, and that the "adoption of 'slave textiles' like madras as fashionable accessories spectacularized and thematized whiteness, and contrasted it with its abject other, blackness".