Cornelia, mother of the Gracchi, presenting her children and saying: "Here are my treasures"

The primary version of Cornelia, Mother of the Gracchi, now in the Louvre and painted in 1795, is Suvée's most celebrated history painting and one of the key works in the Neoclassical genre of Roman virtuous women. The Louvre holding gives the work canonical status within French Neoclassicism alongside similarly themed canvases by David and his followers. The story's Republican simplicity was ideally suited to the political atmosphere of the Thermidorean and Directory periods, when post-Terror France was reasserting the civic values that had theoretically motivated the Revolution while distancing itself from Jacobin excess. Suvée was at the time director of the French Academy in Rome — a position of institutional prestige that gave him authority over the formation of the next generation of French painters. His continued production of large history canvases from Rome demonstrates the continuing importance of classical subject matter to the official French artistic establishment.

The Louvre version uses a horizontal compositional layout across a domestic interior, with Cornelia at center, the bejeweled visitor to one side, and the sons framing the other. Suvée's modeling is firm and clear, with warm tones in the flesh set against the cooler colors of stone and drapery. The drapery folds are classically simplified.