Antoinette Gabrielle Danton

Jacques-Louis David's Antoinette Gabrielle Danton of 1793 depicts the second wife of the great Revolutionary orator — the woman Danton married just months before his own execution by the Committee of Public Safety — captured in David's characteristic directness of psychological observation. The portrait's tragic context — Danton was guillotined just months after this was painted — gives the straightforward bourgeois likeness a retrospective weight that transforms it from documentation into elegy.

The rapid, sketch-like quality suggests this was drawn from life in a single sitting. David's line is economical but expressive, capturing the sitter's features with the same clinical precision he brought to his history paintings.