Young Woman with a Turban

Young Woman with a Turban, at the Cleveland Museum of Art, dates from around 1780 and shows David during his early years in Paris experimenting with exotic costume accessories that were fashionable in both portraiture and history painting. The turban carried orientalizing associations that made it appealing in the late eighteenth century, when European fascination with the Ottoman East was expressed through costume elements that added a note of exotic otherness to otherwise conventional portraits. David's austere oil technique, already fully formed by 1780 through his Roman studies, applied its characteristic sculptural clarity to the challenge of rendering white fabric against warm skin. The turban's bright white provides the painting's lightest passages, painted with fluid confident strokes that model the folds and creases of the draped cloth, while the face beneath is rendered in warmer tones that create a chromatic counterpoint. The Cleveland Museum of Art holds this as an example of David's early portraiture before his career-defining Neoclassical history paintings transformed French painting.

The turban's white fabric provides the painting's brightest passages, painted with fluid, confident strokes that model the folds and creases of the draped cloth. The face beneath is rendered in warmer tones, with the cool white of the turban creating a chromatic counterpoint.