Louis Lafitte

The artist's studio, as part of an album,

probably his descendants;

Private collection since circa 1900;

with David Jones, Paris, Old Master Drawings, 16th-19th Century, 1995, no. 28 (as part of an album);

with Thomas Williams Fine Art Ltd., at Daniel Katz Ltd., A Life More Tranquil: Images of Nineteenth-Century France. Drawings by Louis Lafitte (1770-1828), 1998, no. 27, reproduced on the cover,

where acquired by Diane A. Nixon

New York, The Morgan Library & Museum; Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Art, Private Treasures: Four Centuries of European Master Drawings, 2007, no. 75 (entry by Jennifer Tonkovich);

Northampton, Massachusetts, Smith College Museum of Art; Ithaca, New York, Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Drawn to Excellence: Renaissance to Romantic Drawings from a Private Collection, 2013, no. 84

This delicate portrait of an unknown female sitter was originally part of an album which contained fifty-two drawings by Lafitte, dating between 1809 and 1822. Around twenty of those drawings were portraits of the artist’s friends and family, while the rest captured views of Paris and its surroundings.

The album also contained ten drawings by one of his descendants, Albert Molinaire, all signed and dated, which were added some forty years later onto the pages Lafitte left blank. This addition suggests that the album passed down by descent instead of being offered in the sale of Lafitte's atelier.

The portraits from the album possess an air of warm familiarity, which sets them apart from the many official commissions Lafitte produced in his role as dessinateur du cabinet du roi to both Louis XVIII and Charles X. In the present drawing, the young woman adopts a comfortable, slightly slouchy posture, as she takes a break from sewing to pose for the artist. There is a glint of amusement in her sensitively rendered face. The same sitter appears in another drawing from the album, this time paused in reading.¹

^1.See Thomas Williams Fine Art Ltd. 1998 catalogue, no. 11