Portrait of Madame Charles Mitoire with Her Children

From the Getty Museum record

In a gown of pale blue satin, wearing pearls in her ears and a powdered coiffure piled with roses and orange blossom, Madame Charles Mitoire (née Christine Geneviève Bron, 1760-1842) offers an affectionate smile to her two sons: Alexandre-Laurent (1780-1816), a boy of three with soft curls and a dimpled smile; and Charles-Benoît (1782-1832), a babe in arms, seminude. Applying pastels both wet, with a brush, and dry, with a stick, Labille-Guiard imparted distinct textures to all the different softnesses here depicted: silk and muslin, petals and curls, a mother’s bosom, a baby’s bottom. For all its pearls and powder, this is no ordinary portrait of an eighteenth-century lady, for Madame Mitoire here bears a breast to nurse Charles-Benoît. Though its composition echoes traditional representations of the Virgin and Child with Saint John the Baptist, this portrait also quite radically signals the modernity of its subject and her approach to motherhood. Published in 1762, Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s celebrated Enlightenment treatise on education and child-rearing, Émile, implored women of all classes to cultivate more intimate bonds with their children and, above all, to breast-feed them personally, rather than retaining the services of a wet nurse, as most wealthy families then did. A vogue for breast-feeding swept Europe, and genteel women retreated from public life, into the domestic sphere to fulfill what Rousseau called “their first duty." Depicting a nursing mother, the Portrait of Madame Charles Mitoire may also allude to Rousseau’s recommendations in its presentation of the infant, unencumbered by swaddling clothes (of which Rousseau strongly disapproved) and perhaps also in its inclusion of a glass of wine on the table at left (Rousseau’s tract draws a contrast between milk, “our first nourishment,” and wine, an acquired taste).