Portrait of Jeanne Antoinette Poisson, the Marquise de Pompadour (1721-1764) in muff

François Hubert Drouais's 1763 portrait of the Marquise de Pompadour in her muff is among the later portraits of Louis XV's famous mistress, painted as she entered the final year of her life. Pompadour was one of the most powerful and culturally influential women in eighteenth-century Europe — patroness of Boucher, champion of the Encyclopédie, de facto minister of culture for the French crown. Drouais had largely supplanted Boucher as her preferred portraitist by the early 1760s. The muff — a fashionable winter accessory — gives this portrait an intimate, informal quality that suited Pompadour's mature self-presentation.

Drouais's rococo portrait style is at its most refined here: the silk dress and muff are rendered with meticulous attention to fabric texture and sheen, and the face — despite its idealization — retains individual character. The warm palette and soft light that characterize his female portraiture are fully deployed in this late likeness of his most celebrated sitter.