Portrait of a Woman as Astrea, Probably Mary Josephine Drummond, Condesa de Castelblanco

Portraiture was a popular genre during the age of enlightenment, and Largillierre was among its most renowned early Rococo practitioners in France. Besides serving as a visual memorial, a portrait could express a patron's social position, sentiments and, allegorically, taste and aspirations. Although essentially an allegory, this painting conveys the vitality and warmth of the subject — a sensual woman, full of charm and possessed of great, subtly idealized beauty, in a spectacular brocade gown. The sitter is portrayed as the shepherdess Astrea, the heroine of a seventeenth-century pastoral novel, L’Astrée, by Honoré d’Urfé, a character who embodies chaste love — an appropriate, if contrived, image for a young aristocrat entering marriage.