Portrait of the Marquise de la Ferté-Imbault

The Marquise de la Ferté-Imbault was the daughter of Marie-Thérèse Rodet Geoffrin, one of the most celebrated salonnières of the Enlightenment, whose regular gatherings attracted Voltaire, d'Alembert, Montesquieu, and other leading intellectuals of the age. The marquise herself participated in this world of cultivated sociability, and Nattier's 1740 portrait—now in the Tokyo Fuji Art Museum—captures her at the beginning of her adult life. The painting's presence in Japan reflects the global dispersal of French Rococo art through twentieth-century auction markets. Nattier's relationship to this family extended beyond this single portrait, as he also painted the marquise's mother Madame Geoffrin (see the companion entry in this batch). The Ferté-Imbault portrait exemplifies Nattier's approach to young aristocratic women: graceful, assured, and situated within the conventions of Rococo fashionability without excessive ostentation.

Canvas with Nattier's smooth mid-career handling. The young sitter's dress is rendered with the attention to textile quality that defined his practice, while the face displays his characteristic warm-cool balance—warm undertones beneath a cool surface finish that gives skin its luminous appearance.