Portrait of Madame Charles Mitoire with Her Children

Adélaïde Labille-Guiard

1783

Pastel, on three sheets of blue paper, mounted on canvas, Paper, Canvas

J. Paul Getty Museum

In a gown of pale blue satin, wearing pearls in her ears and a powdered coiffure piled with roses and orange blossom, Madame Charles Mitoire (née Christine Geneviève Bron, 1760-1842) offers an affectionate smile to her two sons: Alexandre-Laurent (1780-1816), a boy of three with soft curls and a dimpled smile; and Charles-Benoît (1782-1832), a babe in arms, seminude. Applying pastels both wet, with a brush, and dry, with a stick, Labille-Guiard imparted distinct textures to all the different softnesses here depicted: silk and muslin, petals and curls, a mother’s bosom, a baby’s bottom. For all its pearls and powder, this is no ordin