Mrs Philippe Lenoir

Mrs. Philippe Lenoir from 1814 at the Louvre is a companion piece to her husband's portrait. Vernet's paired portraits of married couples follow the established convention of formal marriage portraiture. Horace Vernet's fluent oil technique allowed rapid execution of large-scale battle scenes and Orientalist compositions with a journalistic immediacy that his contemporaries found both exciting and, to some academic critics, superficial. Horace Vernet's portrait commissions came from across Europe — from the French aristocracy who survived the Revolution, the new imperial nobility of the Napoleonic era, and the crowned heads and aristocrats of Russia, Germany, and Italy who sought fashionable French portraiture. His portrait manner combined the formal requirements of aristocratic representation with the lighter touch and warmer palette of his Romantic generation, producing likenesses that were simultaneously flattering and specific. His success as a portraitist ran parallel to his military and Oriental painting production, demonstrating the range of a painter who was one of the most commercially successful artists in early nineteenth-century France.

The portrait presents the sitter with polished handling and warm palette. Vernet's refined technique creates an image of bourgeois feminine elegance.