Portrait of a lady, half-length, in a grey dress

The nude breast and soft smile constitute a new artistic formula in pre-revolutionary portraiture in France. While in earlier paintings these two attributes would allude to sexual behavior with a moralizing message, commonly representing prostitutes, in the second half of the 18th century they promoted a new concept of female identity.
In the Age of Enlightenment both new medical texts analyzing the physical constitution of women, and Rousseau through his Julie, ou la Nouvelle Héloïse (1761) and Émile, ou De l’éducation (1762), popularized a new and powerful image of the maternal woman, known as the “good wife” and “good mother”.
The portrait is therefore an allusion to the sitter’s sexual and maternal nature, relating both aspects to physical pleasure, which had recently been given legitimation.