Self-Portrait with Her Daughter Julie

The subtractive test finds very little to take. There are two figures, a seat implied, a fall of drapery and a plain ground. Remove the child and a society portrait remains; remove the mother and a child’s head has nowhere to rest. The interlocked arms are the picture: the child’s round the mother’s neck, the mother’s round the child’s body, one ring inside another, so that neither holds the other more than she is held. The plain ground is required too, since any room or landscape would place them in a world, and the claim is that they are one. What yields is the softness of finish everywhere at once: drapery folds and hair band are permitted ornament, and the sweetness of the child’s look could go. The economy is the Holy Family’s, a formula’s, more than one the panel found.

Score: 8.2 / 10

Something can be stated. A woman who is a painter, a member of the Académie since 1783 and the Queen’s portraitist, presents herself not as a painter but as a mother: no brush, no palette, no easel, her hands occupied with a child. The picture discloses a self made by choosing what to show, and what it shows is a bond in which feeling runs both ways: the child holds as hard as she is held, and the child, not the mother, meets the viewer. That reciprocity is its truest thing. It also discloses the period’s new public cult of maternal feeling, the Rousseauian mother holding her own. But the condition is stated as ideal, not examined: nothing tests the tenderness or shows its cost, and the sharper meanings are brought to it by later viewers. Mood weighs about level with meaning.

Score: 7.4 / 10

The elevation is of one kind, tender warmth, and it is real. The two faces pressed together at the apex of the pyramid, lit from the left against the dark, are a moment of grace, and the white of the gown and the warm flesh carry a quiet radiance. The height recurs only within that register: in the light along the mother’s arm, in the child’s hand at her shoulder. There is no grandeur, no awe, no terror and no transport beyond sweetness; and sweetness held at one pitch over the whole surface lowers the frequency of the rise, because the picture never leaves the note it opens on. Beside the lift of The Swing, one kind of height at the top of an arc, this is a lower and steadier warmth: high in its kind, narrow in range.

Score: 7.3 / 10

Here the work builds rather than only evokes. The structure underneath is the Madonna and Child, and specifically the circular embrace of Raphael’s Madonna della Sedia: the cheek against cheek, the encircling arms, the child’s outward look. That structure bears the load. The picture is composed on it, and it is what lets a private portrait of a woman and her daughter read as an image of the mother as such. The particular stays particular: a named woman in a modish gown of 1789, a girl with her mother’s features, not a sacred pair. The secularisation is itself the content, the sacred mother brought down into a painter’s family. It stops short of the gate because the archetype is borrowed whole rather than rebuilt; the picture inhabits the pattern and does not reach a deeper one through it.

Score: 7.8 / 10

The inheritance is the French society portrait of the Academy and the sentimental family pictures of Greuze, with the Raphaelesque Holy Family behind them; the neo-antique gown and the plain ground belong to the turn toward the antique around David. The departure is in who sits for the Madonna: the painter herself, a professional woman, offering her own motherhood in the Madonna’s place and omitting every sign of her trade. The stake was real and bounded. A woman academician showing herself to the public had a standing to lose; but maternal feeling was the most approved sentiment of the moment, and the manner is her proven manner. It is a swerve in the casting more than in the art, credited for the casting and held where a risk the painting did not run would begin.

Score: 7.4 / 10

Substitute a different form and much is lost. The closed pyramid and the ring of arms are what the picture knows: a bond that encloses two people and shuts out the room. Painting at or near life size holds the two faces still at the apex for as long as one looks, and the plain ground removes every circumstance, so that the form abstracts a particular day into a permanent state. The child’s outward look is the form’s one opening, the hinge between the closed embrace and the public that looks at it. Held below the top because the knowledge could be carried nearly as well by another hand in the same scheme, or by a print after it: the form is borrowed from Raphael, and what is the painter’s own is the surface, the flesh and the gaze, more than the structure.

Score: 7.9 / 10

Evidence over promise: about two and a third centuries, and a reception that has turned. Admired in its time, the picture became in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries an emblem of the sweet and the sentimental, reproduced as an image of mother love and often dismissed with it. From the later twentieth century it has been reread, above all by feminist art history, as a woman artist’s calculated self-presentation: why no brush, why the Madonna, why in 1789, what the child’s look is doing. Those are real questions, and the picture carries them. But the surface yields less on return than the questions do: the sweetness reads the same at the tenth look as at the first, and much of what is now found in the picture is found in its circumstances. The axis stands in Tier III range.

Score: 7.3 / 10

The field is French portraiture of the 1780s. The intrinsic force is modest and real: the picture is one of the clearest statements of the period’s sentimental motherhood in portrait form, and of a woman painter claiming the Madonna’s place for herself; but it reorganises no possibility of painting, and its devices, the Raphael scheme, the plain ground, the antique dress, were all to hand. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: within the field it redirected little, since the Revolution scattered its world, its painter left France in October 1789, and the decades that followed belonged to David and his school. As an image its reach is wide and late, among the most reproduced pictures of maternal tenderness and central to the modern recovery of women painters of the old regime; no later work it redirected can be named.

Score: 7.2 / 10

Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at about 237 years, a little past the row for seventy years to two centuries and interpolated toward the row for centuries. Form: the image is the image she painted, and no loss is known that touches what carries its meaning. Presence: it has been seen and reproduced continuously, and it holds a place in the Louvre; fame is presence and lifts the figure only a little. Fabric: a panel of its age has the ordinary history of varnish and conservation, and no damage to the image is known. The figure stands a tenth below the widest presence the row allows, because the presence is wide but not the very widest, and the picture fell from serious attention for long stretches, though its presence never lapsed while its esteem did.

Score: 9.1 / 10

Judged as command of oil on panel at or near life size, to the same anchors as every medium. The making is of a high order and partly load-bearing. The flesh is modelled with a smooth, luminous finish, the two complexions distinguished, the child’s rosier and the mother’s cooler; the white gown is painted with assurance and economy, its folds turning in the light without fuss; the heads are drawn with real authority, the likeness held while the faces are idealised. The control of the light, from the left across both faces with the ground left dark, does much of the picture’s work. The costs are charged: the finish is uniform, so that flesh, cloth and hair are smoothed to one sweetness; the hands are drawn less firmly than the heads; and the handling never takes a risk.

Score: 8.6 / 10

Take the two most distant elements: the child’s eyes, turned out to the viewer, and the mother’s, turned inward or half closed in the embrace. One law holds them: everything in the picture serves the bond, and the one outward look is the bond made public, the child presenting the pair to the viewer as the mother presents herself to her public. Light, colour, dress and ground obey the same tender register; nothing contradicts it or stands outside it. But the range is narrow, one pair, one moment, one feeling, a plain ground, and narrowness is not coherence. The figure records a law held completely over a small territory, a little below The Swing, whose law holds more parts: statues, a garden, three figures and a slipper in the air.

Score: 8.2 / 10

The orders held: the family, in the mother and daughter; consciousness, in the two looks; the sacred, by the Madonna pattern secularised; art and the artist’s self, by the brush pointedly absent; the antique, by the dress; and, faintly, the court and the class of a royal portraitist. The embrace integrates the first three well. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: no labour, though the picture is a professional woman’s self-portrait and her work is exactly what it hides; no state, though the year is 1789; no nature; and no history except what the viewer brings. It is a two-figure portrait on a plain ground, and the figure describes the form.

Score: 6.2 / 10