Portrait of the Marquise d'Aguirandes (1759): Art, History and Details

Portrait of the Marquise d'Aguirandes (1759) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is François Hubert Drouais (French, 1727–1775).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

Like many French portraitists active during the ancien régime, François-Hubert Drouais was skilled at veiling the physical imperfections of his subjects. This portrait certainly has this quality: the face has been idealized, smoothed, and perfected, but the focus of the painting is less on the Marquise and more on her elegant gown, which is a particularly fine rendering of eighteenth-century printed cloth, with the brilliant gold and white fabric strewn with meticulously detailed flowers and lace.

Object facts

• Title: Portrait of the Marquise d'Aguirandes
• Date: 1759
• Creator attribution: François Hubert Drouais (French, 1727–1775)
• Culture: France
• Type: Painting
• Technique: oil on canvas
• Dimensions: Framed: 138.6 x 111.9 x 13.7 cm (54 9/16 x 44 1/16 x 5 3/8 in.); Unframed: 101 x 85.6 cm (39 3/4 x 33 11/16 in.)
• Collection: P - French 18th Century
• Department: European Painting and Sculpture
• Accession number: 1942.638

Collection credit

Bequest of John L. Severance

Further reading listed by the museum

• Wildenstein, George "Le XVIIIe Siecle," Gazette des Beaux-Arts, vol. VII (January 1932).
• Léon, Paul, W.G. Constable, and Trenchard Cox. Exhibition of French art, 1200-1900 [second ed.]. London: Burlington House, 1932.
• Wildenstein, George "Paintings from America in the French Exhibition," Fine Arts, vol XIX (January 193?).

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.