Portrait of Geneviève Blanchot as Allegory of Painting

The Portrait of Geneviève Blanchot as Allegory of Painting, dated 1704 and now in the Kunstmuseum Basel, is one of the most conceptually rich works in Santerre's oeuvre. The device of portraying a known individual as the personification of an art — here, Painting herself — was an established tradition in European court and academic portraiture, combining the flattery of individual likeness with the elevated register of allegorical art theory. The Allegory of Painting was typically shown holding a brush and palette, wearing a chain with a mask, and crowned with laurel or paint-stained drapery, as codified in Cesare Ripa's Iconologia. By casting a real individual — Blanchot was likely a woman of Santerre's social circle — in this role, the painter asserts both the dignity of his art and the intelligence of his sitter. The Kunstmuseum Basel's collection includes important examples of French Baroque and seventeenth-century painting acquired through Swiss collecting networks.

The allegorical portrait demanded that Santerre integrate the conventional attributes of the Allegory of Painting — brush, palette, mask — into a convincing individual likeness, maintaining the soft luminosity of his characteristic female figure treatment while elevating the sitter to symbolic status through careful attribute placement and a more formal compositional register.