Madame Boyer-Fonfrède et son fils Henri

Painted in 1796 during the Directory period, this double portrait of Madame Boyer-Fonfrède and her son Henri documents a bourgeois family in the immediate aftermath of the Terror. Jean-Baptiste Boyer-Fonfrède, the father, had been a Girondin deputy guillotined in 1793, making this a portrait of a widow and her fatherless child—survivors of the Revolution's most violent phase. The Louvre holds this canvas, giving it the authority of a major national collection. Vincent presents mother and child with composed dignity rather than melodramatic grief, consistent with Neoclassical restraint in the representation of private sorrow. The child Henri is named explicitly in the title, suggesting the portrait also functions as a protective assertion of his identity and legitimacy in a period when the children of executed revolutionaries faced uncertain political status. The work's particular poignancy emerges from the contrast between its composed Neoclassical manner and the raw historical violence that frames it.

Oil on canvas with the warm, intimate lighting Vincent brought to his maternal group portraits. The composition places mother and child in close physical proximity, their relationship expressed through the arrangement of their bodies rather than dramatic gesture. Vincent's smooth flesh modelling gives both figures a composed luminosity appropriate to the portrait's mixture of commemoration and survival.