Bring your favorites together in your free personal gallery.
Your galleryComtesse de la Châtre (Marie Charlotte Louise Perrette Aglaé Bontemps, 1762–1848)
Look first
- What catches your attention?
- Where does your eye go next?
- What would you ask about this work?
Show me
Compare the soft white muslin of her dress with the dark silk sash and hat ribbons, then find the small red book in her hands.
The comtesse wears the simple white muslin dress that Queen Marie Antoinette, a regular sitter of Vigée Le Brun, had made fashionable. The relaxed pose probably owes something to British portraits such as George Romney’s, which the artist may have known from prints. Vigée Le Brun painted it in 1789, in the months before she fled France, and like her, the sitter was a royalist who left during the Revolution.
Oil on canvas · 45 x 34 1/2 in. (114.3 x 87.6 cm · The Metropolitan Museum of Art · Neoclassicism
Look again
What do you notice now?
Try a quick sketch
Take a minute to sketch on any paper. No upload needed.
What did you draw first? What did you leave out?
Details and source
- Museum title
- Comtesse de la Châtre (Marie Charlotte Louise Perrette Aglaé Bontemps, 1762–1848)
- Artist
- Elisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun (French, Paris 1755–1842 Paris)
- Date
- 1789
- Medium
- Oil on canvas
- Dimensions
- 45 x 34 1/2 in. (114.3 x 87.6 cm)
- Credit line
- Gift of Jessie Woolworth Donahue, 1954
- Image license
- CC0 1.0 · Public domain
- Museum record
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Galler’s rooms and hanging scale are imagined. The image is the museum’s original digital reproduction.