Juliette Récamier (*1777; †1849) was a famous french Salonière at her time.
At the age of 15 Julie Bernard, daughter of a notary, married the rich and much older banker Jacques Récamier. At her mansion in Paris they welcomed several famous writers as i.e. François-René de Chateaubriand or Benjamin Constant. It is said that almost every man who met Madame Recamier fell in love with her because of her excellent beauty and adorable charme. For Juliette Récamier held close friendships to some adversaries of Napoleon, she was banished from Paris.
Jacques Louis David was assigned by her to do this portrait. It is not finished for unknown reasons.
The painting is in horizontal format and has a distance between viewer and object, which is quite unusual for a portrait. By that, Juliette Récamier is augmented to an ideal of feminine elegance. She is allongated on a reclined sofa with her head turned towards the the viewer. Her classy but decent appearance with her bare feet, the white sleeveless dress, the curled hair and the absence of jewelry reveal the contemporary ideal of the antique. The room is empty except some pieces of Pompeian-style furniture. Through its unfinishedness, the room creates with its rough brushtrokes and dark colours a contrast to the detailed and bright body of Juliette Récamier and it further reveals Davids technique of doing a painting.
Notice: This type of sofa is nowadays called a Récamière.
I didn‘t have a good time lately. It took so long to post this drawnig, for my idea with the hair went toally wrong. I spent hours and hours trying to fix it, and it always looked like shit. I got very angry and nervous about it, for I was so happy with the drawing before the hair-accident. After several removings of colour and pencil, the paper is now roughened and you can‘t draw on it anymore. Right now, I am in a state of wanting to scream and to break the pencil. So for my health (and the pencil‘s), I decided to post it, as it is. Maybe it‘s the curse of the picture, that it has to stay unfinished (I am very supersticious) or it is me being cursed lately. So let‘s hope that next time, things will turn out better.
