Portrait of Félicité-Louise-Julie-Constance de Durfort, Maréchale de Beurnonville (1782-1808)

Félicité-Louise de Durfort, born into a distinguished French aristocratic family and died at twenty-six in 1808, was commemorated in this portrait completed in or shortly after the year of her death. The portrait's posthumous character — she died at twenty-six — gives it a memorial quality alongside its formal function as a record of aristocratic identity. Blondel's handling of portraits of young aristocratic women in the Empire period follows conventions of dignity and idealization, but knowledge of the sitter's early death may inflect the portrait's reception without being visible in the painting itself. The Maréchale de Beurnonville connection identifies her through marriage rather than birth title, and the canvas records the social position she occupied at the moment of her death.

Female portrait conventions in the Empire period required careful management of fashionable dress — Empire-line gowns, jewellery, hair arrangements — as documentary evidence of taste and status. Blondel focused directional light on the face while handling the costume's pale fabric with the careful attention to textile quality demanded by aristocratic sitters.