Painting of the French painter Jacques Louis David “Portrait of Madame Recamie”. The size of the portrait is 173 x 243 cm, canvas, oil. In his paintings of the late 18th century, David not only expressed the spiritual imperative of his time, but also adopted a new style. One of his contemporaries wrote: “Sculptors, engravers, architects only thought how to adopt his manner.
Furniture, clothes, decorations, fabrics – everything was subject to change according to new tastes and new style. “The new style, that is, the early style of the Empire in all its primordial simplicity, presents a portrait of the seductive and restless wife and daughter of the banker Madame Recamie, received in 1800. The decor in this picture is recreated with a slow and thoughtful consideration of all the elements of the new style. The canapé, bench, lamp was specially made and only then transferred to the picture. In work with his models, David most of the time spent on writing head and hair.
The accessories, perhaps, were executed by Engr, who at that time was a student in the workshop of David. The clothes of Madame Recamie, with a minimum of simple flowing folds, seem deliberately unfinished. The whole background is made very fluently, with a broad brush, through the smears of which here and there the white soil shines through. This impression of extreme generalization, which has become a typical feature in David’s portraits, actually contains a lot of meaning and special beauty. Feels creative impatience, this accelerated pace makes you feel the current of life more strongly, as if piercing the entire canvas.
The natural combination of the bare feet of Madame Recamie and the flowing tunic creates an impression of the eternal beauty of the depicted twenty-three-year-old woman. Madame Rekamier’s desire to become a never-ending nymph was fulfilled, and she really was when she fascinated and fascinated the great French writer Viscount de Chateaubriand years later.
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