Jean-Baptiste Greuze, Portrait of a Lady (Madame de Gléon?)

A young woman wearing a blue silk cape is shown half-length looking out of a stone window. Her hair is fashionably powdered grey and decorated with pearls and blue silk flowers. The style was known as the ‘tête de mouton’ (’sheep’s head‘) and was popular in France in the 1750s. The decorations in her hair were called ‘pompoms’ after Madame de Pompadour, who popularised the style.

The curved shape of the lady’s wide glistening eyes is reiterated in her perfectly shaped eyebrows and further echoed in the curved arrangement of the pearls in her hair. Her cape is edged in brown fur and has a gathered hood, which lies over her shoulders. Below this, a portion of her white dress decorated with lace and a large white bow is visible. She rests her left arm on a piece of light beige cloth draped over the stone ledge to protect her from its chill. The intricate details and folds of the lady’s elaborate cutwork lace cuffs are particularly beautifully observed.

The unusual pose of the woman at a stone window may have been influenced by Rembrandt’s Girl at a Window (Dulwich Picture Gallery, London), which was in Paris during the eighteenth century until it was brought to London sometime in the late 1770s. It was greatly admired and many paintings of girls at windows were inspired by it. The composition was also known through prints, such as that by Pierre-Louis Surugue published in Paris in 1759, around the time of Greuze’s picture. Greuze’s emphasis on the chips and cracks in the stone ledge suggests he knew of this device in the works of seventeenth-century Dutch artists, such as Gerrit Dou, then becoming fashionable in France.

The lady may be Geneviève-Charlotte-Agnès Savalette (about 1732–1795), the daughter of Guillaume Savalette, ’squire of the city of Perpignan and receiver general of the king’s farms’. Geneviève became marquise de Gléon in 1748 when she married Jean-Baptiste de Durban de Gléon (born 1717), with whom she had three children. She was a writer and actress in amateur theatricals and performed at the château de La Chevrette. The château was home, just north of Paris, to the writer Madame Louise d’Épinay, who was a wealthy patron of the writer Rousseau.

In September 1787 Madame de Gléon published a collection of plays. She was described as a ‘beautiful and witty woman who acted to perfection'. There is a watercolour portrait by Louis Carrogis of Madame de Gléon of about 1760 at the Musée Condé, Chantilly, in which she is shown full-length seated in profile. However it is hard to tell if it is the same person.

The lady’s relatively relaxed appearance and her gaze towards something or someone outside and to the left of the picture suggests an informality that appeared in French portraiture around the 1750s. Nattier’s portrait of The comtesse de Tillieres (Wallace Collection, London) of 1750 shows a similarly dressed lady sitting with her arms crossed against a grey background.