François-André Vincent (Paris 1746-1816)

A founding member of the Institut de France who rivaled Jacques-Louis David as the most celebrated and acclaimed history painter of his day, Vincent was also a distinguished and prolific portrait painter. Under the influence of writers like Rousseau, Vincent developed an interest in the character and personalities of children and, while he never had any of his own -- he married his companion of twenty years, the painter Adelaide Labille-Guiard, only in 1800, near the end of her life -- he painted children often and with keen insight.

Joseph Baillio (loc. cit.) shrewdly observed that the present painting of a little girl contentedly working her knitting needles, which is signed and dated 1792, might originally have formed a pair with another portrait by Vincent of a young girl with her hands in a fur muff (private collection), which is of identical dimensions and is signed and dated 1792. Both girls have similarly rounded faces, arched eyebrows, and self-assured expressions, and they might well be fashionably attired sisters whose identities have yet to be discovered. Indeed, one wonders if they might be the two thus-far unlocated portraits of children that Vincent is recorded as having paired and sent to the Salon of 1795, the same exhibition in which he included the fiery scene from William Tell (Musée des Augustins, Toulouse) that had been commissioned in 1791.