From the end of the 18th century into the early nineteenth century, over the course of the Revolutionary era, there was a great increase in women's professional and public artistic activity. In Paris, between 1760 and 1830, at least 395 women exhibited at the Salon, the best known among them including painters such as Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun (1755–1842), Anne Vallayer-Coster (1744–1818), Marguerite Gérard (1761–1837) and Marie-Geneviève Bouliard (1763–1825).¹ While recent research conducted by Dr Paris Spies-Gans has revealed that women painting at this t.mes were not in fact completely restricted to the limited genres of portraiture and still life, as has been historically recorded, these subjects - of which the present example appears to be typical - were plentiful within the output of female artists around 1800.

Jeanne-Elisabeth Chaudet (née Gabiou) was a French painter who specialised in portraits, which were owned by notable patrons, including the Empress Josephine herself. Chaudet studied with Vigée Le Brun and was distantly related to the painter sisters Marie-Elisabeth, Marie-Denise and Marie-Victoire Lemoine (1754–1820).

Chaudet clearly had a particular interest and affinity for painting children, at a t.mes when - following the publication of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's writings - society saw a breakthrough in attitudes towards childhood and ideas about the development of a child’s individual character. While many of Chaudet's depictions of children integrate them into hybrid genre scenes, somet.mes s with moralistic overtones, the present canvas would appear unequivocally to be a portrait, and probably a private commission. The girl's delicate features and the attention to the effect of light on her fine chemise, with its little bow, recall two signed paintings - one of Two sisters embracing, sold at Christie's, New York, 1 May 2019, lot 291;² and the other, a portrait dated 1814, comparable also in its half-length format and quiet expression, sold at Tajan, Paris, 22 March 2018, lot 84. It should likewise be noted that the same motif of an almost identical basket appears in a larger, signed and dated painting of 1817 by Chaudet in the Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris (acc. no. 377).

¹ See P. Spies-Gans, 'Exceptional, but not exceptions: Public exhibitions and the rise of the woman artist in London and Paris, 1760-1830', in Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 51, no. 4, 2018, pp. 393-416.
² https://www.christies.com/en/lot/lot-6198805