Portrait of Madame Bouret as Diana

Nattier's Portrait of Madame Bouret as Diana, from 1745, depicts the wife or daughter of Étienne-Michel Bouret, one of the most extravagantly wealthy tax farmers in mid-eighteenth-century France, known for his ostentatious displays of wealth that were satirized by contemporaries. The commissioning of a portrait historié in the mythological mode from Nattier — the court portraitist par excellence — was itself an act of social aspiration. The Diana guise was ideal for a beautiful young noblewoman, combining the connotations of chastity, beauty, and aristocratic outdoor pursuits.

Nattier presents the subject with his standard combination of silvery landscape, crescent moon diadem, and hunting attributes, rendered in his luminous, porcelain-smooth technique. The transition from formal portraiture to mythological fiction is seamless, as always in Nattier's most accomplished work.