Alexis-Joseph Pérignon

Private Collection, United States

Acquired by the father of the present owner in the United States, circa 1970

In this stately portrait, Alexis-Joseph Pérignon’s subject stares directly toward the viewer, hands clasped confidently over her knee. Known for painting fashionable portraits of distinguished women, as well as for his identity as the son of history and genre painter Alexis-Nicolas Perignon the Younger, the French artist deftly captured not only the individual character of his models, but also the exquisite details of their clothing and other personal attributes. The woman’s self-assured gaze is balanced by the diaphanous quality of her lace-trimmed gown, modestly adorned with three blue bows. Imbuing his female models with a sense of both elegant dignity and undaunted confidence was a familiar theme for Pérignon; this motif can also be readily identified in his famous painting of Marie Antoinette, which was formerly on loan to the Metropolitan Museum of Art from the collection of the New Orleans Museum of Art. The queen bends down to pick up the spilled brushes of the artist Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun (ca. 1859), who has dropped her brushes on the floor while painting a portrait of the queen. The pregnant artist begins to reach for her tools, but is refrained by the queen who holds up a hand as if to say, “stop, you must not overexert yourself.” In this moment, Pérignon has portrayed the women as equals, sharing a status not only as mothers, but as accomplished women in their own right.