Although acquired as a portrait of the marquise de Vintmille, mistress of Louis XV, this painting in fact portrays Terpsichore, the ancient Greek Muse of Music and Dance. Armed with her lyre, plectrum, and bell, she marks the rhythm for a dancer and a group of musicians in the right background. The charm and vivacity of this figure is presented with Nattier’s characteristic ease and intimacy, luminous color, and sweetness of facial expression, enhanced by the artifice of rouge. Perhaps conceived as an overdoor, this painting has been reframed to reveal the original curved contours of the canvas.

Nattier achieved his reputation as the leading court portraitist of France with a skillful series of likeness of Louis XV and his family. He evolved an innovative formula for mythological portraiture, entirely different in spirit from the genre admired in the sixteenth century. Excelling as a painter of women, he flattered his sitters by endowing them with the attributes of goddesses of Olympus and posing them against backdrops of classical columns, voluminous silken draperies, and decorative elements.

-Adapted from a text by Marion C. Stewart, Masterworks of European Painting in the California Palace of the Legion of Honor (1999)