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Your galleryMadame de Pastoret and Her Son
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Look for the needle and thread that were never painted, then at the baby asleep in the wooden cradle at the right.
David painted Adélaïde de Pastoret with her baby son, born early in 1791, asleep beside her, but the upheavals of the Revolution probably left the picture unfinished. He completed the stippled underpainting but not the smooth surface of his finished works, and never even added the needle and thread she should be holding. David was then a committed revolutionary and her husband a firm royalist; she refused the portrait, and after David’s death her grown son bought it from his estate.
Oil on canvas · 129.8 × 96.6 cm · Art Institute of Chicago · Neoclassicism
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Details and source
- Museum title
- Madame de Pastoret and Her Son
- Artist
- Jacques-Louis David (French, 1748–1825)
- Date
- 1791–92
- Medium
- Oil on canvas
- Dimensions
- 129.8 × 96.6 cm (51 1/8 × 38 in.); French: 156.3 × 123.6 cm (61 1/2 × 48 5/8 in.)
- Credit line
- Clyde M. Carr Fund and Major Acquisitions Endowment
- Image license
- CC0 1.0 · Public domain
- Museum record
- Art Institute of Chicago
Galler’s rooms and hanging scale are imagined. The image is the museum’s original digital reproduction.