Madame de Selve faisant de la musique

Adélaïde Labille-Guiard's Madame de Selve faisant de la musique of 1787 exemplifies her mature portraiture at its most relaxed and intimate. Labille-Guiard was one of the two leading women portraitists in pre-Revolutionary Paris — Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun was the other — and her reputation rested on her access to aristocratic and court sitters as well as her teaching of other women artists. Depicting Madame de Selve at her keyboard captures the Rococo ideal of cultivated feminine accomplishment while also demonstrating Labille-Guiard's ability to construct a convincing interior setting. Music-making as a portrait theme signaled refinement and sensibility in eighteenth-century French culture. The painting dates from just two years before the Revolution upended the aristocratic world that sustained this kind of portraiture.

Labille-Guiard deploys a warm, intimate palette of golden yellows and creamy whites that evokes candlelit interior light. The keyboard instrument and the sitter's dress are rendered with careful descriptive precision. The composition is informal by the standards of the period, with the sitter in a natural absorbed pose rather than turned directly to the viewer.