Portrait de jeune femme en allégorie de la Peinture

Depicting a sitter as an allegory of Painting—personified as a woman with palette, brushes, and a canvas—was a conceit with a long tradition in European art, from Vermeer's Art of Painting to later Rococo variations. Nattier's portrait of a young woman as the personification of Painting, now in the Musée de la Cour d'Or in Metz, circa 1750, participates in this tradition while inflecting it with the characteristic lightness of the Rococo period. The conceit allowed educated sitters to identify themselves with the elevated status of the visual arts, which were undergoing a sustained argument for their equality with poetry and literature in eighteenth-century aesthetic theory. Holding a palette or brushes while wearing elegant dress created a productive tension between the manual labour of painting and the social position of the aristocratic or upper-bourgeois woman. The Musée de la Cour d'Or in Metz holds a diverse collection of regional art and antiquities.

The painting-within-a-painting conceit requires Nattier to represent artistic tools—palette, brushes, perhaps a half-finished canvas—alongside the sitter's dress. He differentiates these varied surfaces with deliberately varied brush handling, turning the technical demonstration into part of the subject.