Self-Portrait with a Harp

This work has been identified with a self-portrait that Mademoiselle Ducreux exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1791. The sitter's graceful pose and the sumptuous fabrics were admired by contemporary critics.

Although harps were popular accessories for portraits in this period, Rose Adélaïde Ducreux really was both a talented artist and a gifted musician. She was the daughter of Joseph Ducreux (1735–1802), principal portraitist to Marie Antoinette (1755–1793), who had traveled to the Queen's native Vienna to paint her in 1769. Rose Adélaïde Ducreux's first exhibited work, at the Salon de Correspondance in 1785, was a self-portrait in which she showed herself painting (location unknown); in her self-portraits she customarily includes attributes of art and music. Since they were not members of the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture, both Joseph Ducreux and his daughter were excluded from the official Salon until 1791, when the doors were opened to all. In 1791 she exhibited two portraits, including this one; she showed six more portraits there between 1793 and 1799.

Ducreux never signed her work. The few paintings by her that have now been identified had been confused with those of other artists such as Antoine Vestier (1740–1824) and Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun (1755–1842). This composition, however, exactly matches the description of her life-size self-portrait playing the harp, exhibited in 1791; the floral carpet recurs in another portrait of a young woman by Ducreux (private collection). On the table sit a Neoclassical vase, a book whose spine is inscribed "Opera", and her music, a song by the harpist and composer Jean Joseph Benoît Pollet (1753–1823). She holds a tuning fork in her right hand.

In 1802 Ducreux left Paris for the French colony of Santo Domingo, as she was engaged to the maritime prefect of the island, François Lequoy de Montgiraud (1748–1804). They married, but shortly thereafter she died of yellow fever. Her father, from whom she had previously been inseparable, died two days later.

(Source: Metropolitan Museum of Art)