Henriette Delacroix was the sister of Eugene Delacroix, who was still a small child when David painted her and would not become France's leading Romantic painter for another two decades. By marriage she became Madame de Verninac. A little over a year after this portrait, the sculptor Joseph Chinard also portrayed her, in a marble bust that cast her as the goddess Diana, testing the point of an arrow with her finger and gazing off as if something in the distance had caught her attention^[1]. Set beside David's painting, the bust shows how differently two artists working from the same sitter, in the same few years, could interpret the fashion for classicism: Chinard reached for mythology and allegory, while David kept Henriette in her own clothes and her own room, letting her plainness do the work^[1].

David seats Henriette in profile to the viewer and then turns her head and torso back toward us, so the pose reads as a moment caught rather than arranged. Her arm rests along the back of the chair, an informal gesture that would have been unthinkable in a grander, more ceremonial portrait a generation earlier. The room behind her is left almost bare. Nothing in the setting competes with her for attention, and the confidence of her gaze carries the picture^[1]. David used the same stripped-back approach the following year in his portrait of Madame Recamier, seating his sitter in a plain Empire-line dress with bare arms and cropped hair against a room holding nothing but a single antique sofa, stool and candelabra, an emptiness so deliberate it reads as a statement about the sitter's elegance rather than an unfinished background^[3].

The white gown and loose hair Henriette wears were not costume for the sitting. By the late 1790s, dress à l'antique, the draped white fashion David himself had helped popularise through his history paintings of Roman heroines, had become ordinary daywear among fashionable Frenchwomen rather than an occasional costume for a party or a portrait^[2]. Contemporary fashion plates from the period show the same style of dress David gives Henriette here, and art historians have pointed to this portrait specifically as evidence of how completely the look of David's painted heroines had migrated into real wardrobes^[2]. The effect is that Henriette appears both as herself and as a living echo of the classical figures David had spent the previous decade painting.