Girl's head with coral jewels

In 1886, Eugène Froment-Delormel distributed his friend Amaury-Duval's inherited studio collection among several museums. On hearing of this, Eudoxe Marcille, director of the museum from 1870 to 1890, who was always on the lookout for works to enrich the Musée d'Orléans' panorama of the modern school, approached him and obtained the cartoons and replicas of the frescoes in the Château de Linières, which had been refused by the Louvre. Concerned in turn that all aspects of Amaury-Duval's talent should be represented, Froment-Delormel added to the canvases and drawings a "specimen of what was the known and rewarded note of his talent as a portraitist".
The art of portraiture is not the least of those mastered by the painter, who established himself from his very first works, from 1833 onwards, as the best pupil of Ingres and an outstanding portraitist in the rendering of fabrics, porcelain complexions and the refinement of the years of the July Monarchy.
His meeting with Ingres in 1825 made him his first pupil and faithful assistant, but he was able to free himself from his mentor's strict model to develop his own style. The painting offered to the Museum, produced at the end of the Second Empire, a year after the painter's last submission to the Salon, bears witness to the search for archaism and simplification of form that accompanied his work, first in religious art, notably in his murals at Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois in Paris, but also in portraiture. The use of the profile, based on the principle of medallions in vogue during the Romantic period, emphasizes the legibility of the face against a blue background. Here, the sky is replaced by a grayish upholstery fabric, highlighting the model's coral jewels.