Portrait of Madame Récamier

The story of Portrait of Madame Récamier

Juliette Récamier was twenty-two, famous for being charming, and apparently impossible to keep still. David started this portrait in 1800, argued with her about the pose, and left it unfinished when she took her business to a rival. What survives is better for it. She reclines barefoot on a low chaise in a room stripped to a lamp and a footstool, wrapped in a white gown that catches almost no color, and the empty space around her does the talking. It hangs in the Louvre, and it is the image most people carry in their heads when they think of Neoclassical calm.

This is one of the quietest paintings in our catalog and one of the easiest to live with. The palette is bone, ivory, and soft umber with a dull green cushion, so it will not fight your furniture. It suits bedrooms, dressing rooms, and living rooms with pale walls, and it is a natural fit for Scandinavian, Empire-revival, or minimalist interiors where a loud image would feel wrong. Because the composition is wide with a lot of open floor, it needs room to breathe. We offer it up to the Extra Large at 50.5 × 36 in; the Large at 33.7 × 24 in is the sweet spot over a sofa or a bed, and the Medium at 22.5 × 16 in works above a desk.

The obvious companion is Ingres's La Grande Odalisque, another reclining figure painted a few years later with a very different temperature. From David himself, The Death of Marat shares the same stripped-down staging, and Napoleon Crossing the Alps shows how loud he could be when he wanted to. More from Jacques-Louis David.

Printed in our studio from a public-domain photograph of the Louvre canvas, with the unfinished passages left exactly as David left them.