François Gérard was one of the most important and influential neoclassical painters in France from the Revolution through the Bourbon Restoration, displaying an uncanny ability to navigate the shifting political and cultural waters of the day. Born in Rome in 1770, he was the son of Jean-Simon Gérard, a member of the French diplomatic corps, and Cleria Mattei, a young Italian woman whom his father married while serving in the household of the Cardinal de Bernis, French Ambassador to the Papal States. In 1780, the family returned to Paris, where François was accepted into the elite Pension du Roi, thanks to the support of the Marquis de Breteuil; that same year, François’s brother, Alexandre Gérard, was born. A student of the sculptor Augustin Pajou and then of the painter Nicolas-Guy Brenet, Gérard entered the studio of Jacques-Louis David in 1786 and obtained a second-place in the Prix de Rome of 1789. However, he was unable to participate in the competition the following year, when, upon the sudden death of his father, he was obliged to assume the guardianship of his family. He travelled to Italy with his mother and brother in August 1791, but stayed only briefly, returning to Paris within months. With David’s support, Gérard was awarded lodgings and a studio in the Louvre, where he completed his first great history painting of Belisarius (1795; Musée du Louvre, Paris) in just 18 days. To make money, he illustrated editions of Racine and Virgil for the publisher Didot, but it would be his full-length portrait of his friend, the miniaturist Jean-Baptiste Isabey holding the hand of his young daughter (Musée du Louvre, Paris), that firmly established his reputation when it became the sensation of the Salon of 1796. Portrait commissions followed quickly on this success and for the remainder of his long career. In addition to the many crown and state commissions he received for history paintings, he was the leading portrait painter of the Empire and Restoration. Gérard painted Napoleon and most of the Imperial family; members of the various dynasties allied with France; writers, diplomats and artists throughout Europe; and on a single day in 1814, three monarchs – Emperor Alexandre of Russia, King Frederich Wilhelm II of Prussia, and Louis XVIII – filed through his studio to sit to him. Contemporaries called him ‘the painter of Kings and the King of Painters’, and he was made Baron in 1819. His output during the twelve years of Napoleon’s reign (1804-1815) includes nearly 50 full-length portraits and 80 half-length or en buste.

Gérard painted numerous portraits of members of his family, including several of his younger brother, Alexandre Gérard, and the present portrait of his sister-in-law, Sophie Catherine Sylvoz. Born Jacques-Alexandre Gérard (13 April 1780-28 October 1832), Alexandre was a decade younger than François. He attended the Ecole polytechnique in Paris, where he trained as a botanist and zoologist, before joining Napoleon’s Egyptian Campaign in 1798, in which he participated in the siege of Alexandria. Returning to France in November of that year, he was captured by enemy forces and imprisoned in the fortress of Yedikule, in Istanbul, a Byzantine prison known to the French as the ‘château des Sept-Tours’; he was held there for nearly three years. Upon his release, he returned to France and joined the Administration of Finance, first as ‘Directeur des Contributions Directes' – head of tax collection – in Chambéry, where he met his wife, then in other administrative positions in Orléans and Paris. He served as a member of the Commission de Sciences et des Arts. Alexandre Gérard died in 1832, and is buried in the family crypt in Montparnasse Cemetery, beside wife, his brother, and François’s Italian-born wife, Marguerite Françoise Mattei (1775-1848), whom the artist had married in Paris in 1794.

Sophie Catherine Sylvoz (8 October 1792-16 March 1867) was a native of Chambéry, where she met and married Alexandre. Their son, Henri Gérard (1818-1903), was born in Orléans in 1818, while Alexandre was briefly seconded there. In adulthood, Henri would serve as Mayor of Barbeville and Counsellor-General of the Canton of Balleroy, and was the earliest and most important documentarian of his uncle’s career. He inherited François’s title and much of his estate (François and his wife had no children) and many of his uncle’s paintings, including this lively and graceful portrait of his mother, which he lent in 1913 to the celebrated exhibition David et ses Pupils at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Paris; it remained with his descendants until the 1980s. Although catalogued by Henri Gérard in his Oeuvres du Baron François Gérard (3 vols, 1852-1857) as having been executed in 1831, the Portrait of Mme. Alexandre Gérard is on an unlined canvas which bears on its reverse the inscription: ’21 juillet/1823 auteuil’, more likely the authentic date of the painting, given Sophie’s apparent age and the style of her hair and costume, which are of the fashion of the 1820s.