The sitter was a French educator, writer and lady-in-waiting to Queen Marie Antoinette. She was the daughter of Edme-Jacques Genet (1726-1781), the highest ranking clerk in the foreign ministry. Having received a literary education, she was fluent in English and Italian by the age of 15. Her academic accomplishments earned her the appointment of reader to the daughters of King Louis XV in 1768 and a few years later she was elevated to Femme de chambre, a role which put her in charge of Queen Marie Antoinette's treasury and guardian of her jewellery. In 1774 she married Pierre-Dominique-François Berthollet Campan (1749-1797), but they separated in 1790. She waited on the Queen until the storming of the Tuileries Palace in 1792, during which she was forcibly separated from her. Her own home was pillaged and burned in the early days of the Revolution and she fled to the countryside. Although she survived the Reign of Terror, it left her financially ruined. She decided to support herself by establishing a school in Saint-Germain-en-Laye. The school was a success and it included as its pupils Hortense de Beauharnais, daughter of Empress Josephine. She was later appointed superintendent of the academy founded by Napoleon for the education of the orphaned daughters of members of the Legion of Honour and she held this post until the school was abolished upon the Bourbon Restoration in 1814. She retired to Mantes where she died in 1822, leaving to posterity her Memoirs of the Private Life of Marie Antoinette, a valuable historical source of information about life at court during the reign of Louis XVI, and a treatise on the education of women, posthumously published in 1824. A two-volume edition of The Private Life of Marie-Antoinette by Madame Campan and with bindings by Richard Cosway, R.A. from the Library of William Doyle, was sold Christie's, London, 11-13 July 2000, lot 577.
This is probably the portrait of Madame Campan listed in the artist’s second fee book, Paris, Bibliothèque Jacques Doucet, Ms 104, folio 15, for the end of 1791. He also painted her in 1789 but the artist did not charge the sitter for her portraits.