Le cocarde nationale

Auguste-Claude-Simon Legrand after Louis-Léopold Boilly

National Gallery of Art

Two smooth-faced, smiling people embrace and look at us in a room a fireplace, chairs, and a table in this vertical, colored etching and aquatint. The couple are in the center of the composition. To the right in that pair, one person sits in a wood chair with an upholstered seat and the other stands. Both people have pale skin with rosy cheeks, wide-set, large brown eyes, delicate noses and mouths, and pointed chins. The seated person is dressed in a military uniform with a white vest, a rose-pink coat, white, knee-length britches, white stockings, and black shoes with silver buckles. His ankles are crossed and the britches trimmed with powder-blue at the knees. A sword hangs from his left hip, to our right. He has dark gray, curly hair under a bicorn hat, which has a blue and dark pink badge on the front and blue and white feathers issuing from the top. The woman stands close to him, and he rests the hand we can see on her waist. Her puffy, ash-blond hair curls along her shoulders and falls down her back. Her white bodice is cut low across an ample bosom, and pin ribbons are tied around the upper arm we can see. She wears a pale, sky-blue, voluminous skirt. She holds the seated person’s chin with one hand and touches the hat with the other. A long stringed instrument lies across the seat and armrest of a chair just behind her. A table next to that, along the left edge of the sheet, holds a white bottle and piece of cloth, perhaps a lacy cap. A mantle with a bellows and a screen is to the right of and behind the man. A gold-colored ormolu clock sits on the mantle and a gold double candle sconce hangs to the left on molding that frames the fireplace. More furniture, perhaps a dresser, is in the background in front of a sable-brown wall.