What's in a Name?

One of the most popular paintings in the Metropolitan Museum is a portrait of a pretty art student, Mlle. Charlotte du Val d'Ognes. Scholars have always assumed that Jacques Louis David painted it and surpassed himself in doing so; last week the scholars were proved wrong.

Charles Sterling, Louvre curator and foreign adviser to the Met, did the proving. In the Met's current Bulletin, Sterling confessed he had always viewed Mlle. Charlotte with "a mixture of admiration and skepticism." The complex background, the lighting from behind, the modeling and drawing are all unlike David. Painter-prophet of the French Revolution, David was the sort of man who could and did express disappointment that only 80 aristocrats were guillotined in one morning. Mlle. Charlotte's atmosphere of sweetness & light hardly typifies his work.

What's more, says Sterling severely: "The articulation of the shoulder and the wrist lacks correctness. The legs, of excessive length, betray a mannerism such as David never exhibits in his portraits, and in no such degree as here even in his figure compositions. And when did [David] paint flesh as pink as this and as transparent?"

Finally, Sterling turned up the fact that the painting is reproduced in an engraving of the Paris Salon of 1801--which David boycotted. The Salon catalogue for that year does, however, list several portraits by an obscure follower of David named Constance Marie Charpentier, and a contemporary clipping describes one of them as "a young lady almost entirely in shadow." That one, Sterling reasons, is probably the Met's picture.

His conclusion vastly lowers the portrait's market value (estimated at $100,000), but Mlle. Charlotte remains as springlike and serene as ever.

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