National Gallery of Victoria acquires Portrait by Louise Bouteiller

12 December 2017

A portrait by Louise Bouteiller (1783 to 1828) has been acquired by the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne.

This portrait by Louise Bouteiller (1783 to 1828) has been acquired by the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne. The daughter of a planter in Saint-Domingue, Bouteiller trained with Pierre Bouillon, himself a pupil of Jacques-Louis David in Paris.

Painted in 1818, it shows the young Césarine de Houdetot, Baronne de Barante, a friend of the artist and a painter herself, in a setting that evokes Mauritius, where she lived until the age of four. Bouteiller was born in the Caribbean, and both women spent their early childhood in the colonies.

Césarine de Houdetot sits in a white muslin dress, an orange Indian shawl across her lap and two madras scarves tied at her waist and in her hair. She has looked up from Bernardin de Saint-Pierre's Paul et Virginie, the novel set in Mauritius that was among the most widely read of the period. Behind her is the church at Pamplemousses, where the lovers of the novel are buried and where Césarine de Houdetot was herself baptised.