A lady burning letters in an elegant interior

Jean-Baptiste Mallet was born in Grasse but trained in Paris under the Neo-classical painter, Pierre-Paul Prud'hon. He soon became an active and successful painter in the French capital, exhibiting history pictures, genre scenes and portraits at every Salon from 1793 to 1827 and earning a first-class medal in 1817. While he preferred to paint mythological subjects populated with classical nudes, Mallet was most sought-after for his sophisticated genre scenes, which were set within fashionable Parisian interiors and executed in the style of Louis-Philibert Debucourt and Louis-Léopold Boilly (see, for example, Mallet's The Painful Letter; Musée Cognacq-Jay; Paris). The delicate brushwork of the present painting, along with its typically bourgeois subject matter, render it a fine example of the artist's popular formula favored in early nineteenth-century France.