Henri-Ernest de Beaufort

Prud'hon painted Henri-Ernest de Beaufort in 1818, and the canvas is now held in the Saint Louis Art Museum. The sitter is a young male — the age and setting suggest either a private family commission or a portrait of a young man at the outset of a social or professional career. Male youth portraits were a specific genre with their own conventions of vigorous bearing, direct gaze, and implied future promise. Prud'hon brought his characteristic atmospheric warmth to this commission rather than adopting the cooler, more formal manner of David's school for male portraiture. The Saint Louis Art Museum acquired this work as part of its French nineteenth-century holdings, where Prud'hon's relatively rare male portraits occupy a particular place in representing his approach to sitters whose social type required different visual conventions than his more celebrated female subjects.

The three-quarter portrait of a young male sitter tests Prud'hon's ability to reconcile his characteristic atmospheric softness with the conventions of vigorous masculine youth portraiture. His solution — maintaining the warm light source and atmospheric background — gives the young sitter an unusual quality of sensitive interiority rather than the assertive confidence typical of male academic portraiture.