Don Quichotte déshabillé par les demoiselles de la duchesse

Cervantes's Don Quixote was among the most frequently illustrated prose narratives in eighteenth-century French painting and book illustration, and the scene of Don Quixote being undressed and attended by the duchess's ladies was among its most comic and humiliating episodes. Charles Joseph Natoire painted this subject in 1731, now at the Château de Compiègne, early in his career. The Rococo period had a particular affinity for Don Quixote subjects: the novel's combination of comic dignity, absurd gallantry, and the contrast between illusion and reality resonated with the era's sophisticated self-awareness. Compiègne, as a royal château, suggests this was a work connected to royal or aristocratic patronage of literary subjects. A series of Don Quixote paintings was executed by several French artists of the period for aristocratic clients who wanted their interiors to reflect their literary cultivation.

The comic domestic scene requires Natoire to capture the contrast between Don Quixote's deluded dignity and the ladies' undisguised amusement, using expression and posture to convey the narrative's ironic humour. The interior setting — furnished with the trappings of aristocratic comfort — frames the central comic action. The palette is light and the handling fluent throughout.