Portrait of Madame Récamier

Portrait of Madame Récamier is an unfinished oil-on-canvas portrait of the Parisian salon hostess Juliette Récamier, née Bernard (1777–1849), begun by Jacques-Louis David in 1800; it is in the Louvre, Paris (INV 3708), and the museum gives its size as 1.74 × 2.44 m.

Juliette Récamier, the wife of a banker and one of the most admired women of Directory and Consulate society, commissioned the portrait with her husband. David started it in the spring of 1800 and left it unfinished at the end of that year. Accounts of the break differ in detail: Récamier was often late for sittings and the two quarrelled, and David is said to have abandoned the work on learning that she had also commissioned a portrait from his pupil François Gérard, completed in 1805. Only her head is fully worked; the dress lacks highlights, the furniture and floor are loosely brushed, and the priming shows through in places.

She reclines on an antique-style day bed, her head turned towards the viewer, wearing a simple white high-waisted dress with nearly bare arms and short hair in the fashionable Titus cut. The setting is almost empty: a tall bronze candelabrum with an oil lamp, a low footstool and a dark, muted background in browns, greens and greys. The horizontal format was unusual for a portrait at the time. The sofa type has since been called a récamier, and the pose of a reclining woman looking over her shoulder was taken up by Ingres in his Grande Odalisque of 1814; René Magritte later parodied the picture by replacing the sitter with a coffin.

The canvas stayed with David until his death in 1825. At his studio sale in April 1826 it was bought for 6,180 francs by Charles Lenormant, husband of a great-niece whom the Récamiers had adopted, who sold it to the royal household for the same sum that December; it reached the Louvre in January 1827.