Disdain (Le Dédain)

As with his contemporary and rival, Jacques Louis David, François André Vincent worked and thrived in a period marked by shifting aesthetics and political upheaval. Executed probably just before the French revolution, this drawing presents a woman who is not a delicate rococo flower but rather an embodiment of confidence and strength, who seems to literally look down on us.




It is not a portrait of an individual but a study of an emotion, in this case disdain. Têtes d’expression, or expressive heads, were a central pillar in academic theory at the time, in a direct lineage from Charles Le Brun’s codification of the passions. The prints that accompanied Le Brun’s treatise were, by the second half of the 18th century, increasingly seen as exaggerated and lacking in naturalism. To counteract these deficiencies, a prize was created where students competed to convey a specific emotion by drawing the face of a young female model assigned to adopt the persona of a character from ancient history or mythology. By the 1780s, when Vincent drew this sheet, he was no longer a student, but a successful history painter with a large studio. Nonetheless, Disdain can be situated within the genre of the tête d’expression, at once a declaration of his skill, a model for students, and a prize for collectors.