Jean Nicolas Laugier, engraver

Wearing an Empire-style dress, a shawl draped around one arm and ivy—a symbol of fidelity and endurance—in her hand, Germaine de Staël leans on a marble ledge looking confidently past the viewer. While her dress recalls Greco-Roman tunics, her hair is wrapped in a “Turkish” turban, an exoticizing accessory fashionable at the time. A society hostess, novelist, and political thinker, Madame de Staël was a friend of Madame Récamier, portrayed in this gallery, and Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun, portrayed in the adjacent gallery. She was also an outspoken critic of Napoleon’s despotic ambitions—a stance that forced her to spend more than a decade in exile. This highly detailed engraving, executed in the French academic style, was based on an earlier portrait by Neoclassical painter François Gérard.