Portrait of Charlotte du Val d'Ognes by Marie-Denise Villers

Not everyone agrees that this portrait of an artist at work is by Marie-Denise Villers. There was a time when it was believed to be by Jacques-Louis David and then a strong case was made for Constance Marie Charpentier being the portraitist.

There are also suggestions that the supposed subject of the painting is not Charlotte du Val d’Ognes but the artist herself, this being a self-portrait. A healthy dose of scepticism must therefore be added to any statement made about the painting’s subject or creator. The fact that the people involved are women, and therefore not highly regarded in the art world for that fact alone, could have a lot to do with it. The names are not exactly well known, but perhaps they should be.

The painting, dating from around 1801, was acquired by New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1917. As it was unsigned, the attribution to Jacques-Louis David – a well-known painter in the neoclassical style – was based on certain features of the painting, notably the classical white tunic and Grecian hairstyle of the sitter.

However, this idea was challenged in 1951 by Charles Sterling, the Museum’s director, who made the claim for Constance Marie Charpentier (1767-1849), who was a pupil of David’s. The attribution to Marie-Denise Villers (1774-1821) is now generally accepted, but not universally so. Villers also studied in David’s studio at one time.

Another possibility is that the mysterious Charlotte du Val d’Ognes is a complete red herring and that this is either a portrait of Charpentier by Villers or the other way round (assuming that one dismisses the self-portrait idea). Given that the painting shows a woman at work on a sketchpad as she looks intently at the artist, one has to assume that it is the artist whose image is being drawn by the sitter.

It is known that Jacques-Louis David took female pupils and it would have been no surprise if he gave them the exercise of sketching each other. The portrait is clearly much more than a sketch, so presumably the original drawing was the groundwork for this oil painting on canvas that measures 64x51 inches.

A great deal of work was clearly done when the medium changed to oils, notably in the lighting of the subject, the contrast of brightness and shade, and the details of the folds in the sitter’s dress. The influence of David’s instructions to his pupil can clearly be seen.

One also gets the sense that the artist went out of her way to impress her tutor by featuring a broken window in the background. This is shown via a subtle change in the lighting as between the section of the window frame covered by glass and not, coupled with a gradation from light to dark from bottom to top.

The painting is not perfect, notably in the weak portrayal of the subject’s left arm, but there is enough skill demonstrated here to convince the viewer that this is the work of a highly talented artist, albeit one under instruction from one of the greatest artists of the time. In particular one has to admire the degree of intimacy created by the expression on the sitter’s face, to which the lighting and composition point. The subject has been indeed been described as “an 18th century Mona Lisa”.

It is an essentially feminine work of art, and this is a feature that is hard to find in fine art before the modern era. Despite the obvious quality of this work, the artist is scarcely known – and that is true whether one chooses to accept Villers or Charpentier as the person to be credited for it. It is therefore highly regrettable to discover that when it was confirmed that this was a work by a woman rather than a man, its monetary value plummeted in the art market.