JOSEPH-SIFFRED DUPLESSIS attrib. to

PORTRAIT OF A LADY

JOSEPH-SIFFRED DUPLESSIS
Carpentras,1725 – 1802 Paris

Oil on canvas
60 x 48 cm / 23.6 x 18.9 inches (framed 74 x 64 cm / 29.1 x 25.2 inches)

The costume provides the key to dating the present portrait. Thanks to the acute observations of the renowned fashion historian Alexandre Vassiliev, who identified both the sitter's canezou and her dormeuse coiffure, the work can be dated with considerable precision to around 1778–1780. This chronology proves particularly significant when considered alongside the proposed attribution to Joseph-Siffred Duplessis.

The years around 1778–1780 correspond to the most brilliant phase of Duplessis's career. Following the completion of the official state portrait of Louis XVI in 1777, the artist became firmly established among the leading portrait painters of Paris and was fully integrated into the intellectual, political and artistic life of the French capital.

These years witnessed the creation of some of his most celebrated works, including the official portrait of Louis XVI (1777), the famous portrait of Benjamin Franklin (1778), one of the most widely recognised images of the American statesman, the portrait of Jacques Necker (1779), one of the most influential political figures of pre-Revolutionary France, as well as portraits of members of the royal family and court circles, including the Princesse de Lamballe. He also portrayed some of the leading cultural figures of his age, among them the celebrated composer Christoph Willibald Gluck (1775).

The dating of the present portrait therefore does more than establish its chronology. It places the work within the very years in which Duplessis created the portraits that secured his reputation as one of the foremost portraitists of eighteenth-century Europe.

The directness of the gaze, the remarkable sense of likeness and the restrained elegance of the composition are qualities that contemporaries particularly admired in Duplessis. These very characteristics attracted the attention of Dr. Bodo Hofstetter, who proposed an attribution of the present portrait to the artist.

Hofstetter's observation gains additional weight from the chronology suggested by the costume. The proposed dating coincides precisely with the period in which Duplessis, at the height of his powers, produced many of the masterpieces that define his artistic legacy. Seen in this context, the present portrait may be appreciated not merely as the likeness of an elegant unknown lady, but as a work belonging to the refined culture of late Ancien Régime France, created on the eve of the profound political and social transformations that would reshape Europe.

PROVENANCE
Private collection, France.