Madame Charles Maurice de Talleyrand Périgord (1761–1835)

The sitter — identified as Madame Charles Maurice de Talleyrand Périgord, wife of France's most celebrated diplomat — connects Gérard's portrait to one of the most complex figures of the Napoleonic era. Catherine Worlée Grand, who had married Talleyrand in 1802, was a woman of Indian-born Creole origins who had traveled across multiple worlds — British colonial India, London, and Paris — before becoming the wife of the man who would negotiate France's position at almost every major European diplomatic settlement from the Revolution to the Restoration. The Metropolitan Museum of Art's holding of this portrait places it in one of the world's great collections of European painting. Gérard's 1804 portrait captures Madame Talleyrand at the beginning of the Empire, when her husband's position as Foreign Minister made this a highly visible social commission. The portrait's visual statement of elegance and cosmopolitan refinement suited both the sitter's actual history and the image the Talleyrand household wished to project.

Gérard's handling of this portrait likely emphasizes the cosmopolitan elegance and dark exotic beauty for which Madame Talleyrand was known in contemporary accounts. The composition would deploy his characteristic smooth flesh modeling, careful attention to the texture of fashionable dress, and the controlled directness of pose that made his female portraits the most sought-after of the Empire period.