Portrait of Madame Thomas (née Camille Boucher)

This portrait of Madame Thomas (née Camille Boucher) in watercolor with graphite demonstrates Isabey's skill in the most intimate and personal medium of 19th-century portraiture. Watercolor portraiture was a special skill that required the ability to render flesh tones, fabric textures, and facial expression with a transparency and freshness that oil painting could not match. Isabey's handling of the medium—graphite for the structural underdrawing, watercolor for the color and atmosphere—produces a portrait that is simultaneously precise and lively, capturing the sitter's personality as well as her appearance.

Isabey's watercolor portraits are among his most personal works, produced for private clients rather than public exhibitions. They demonstrate a side of his practice that is less well known than his marine paintings and genre scenes but equally accomplished: the ability to capture a likeness with the economy and freshness that watercolor demands. The sitter, Madame Thomas, was presumably a member of the bourgeois society that provided Isabey with his portrait commissions.

Portrait of Madame Thomas is Isabey's watercolor portraiture at its most accomplished: graphite structure, watercolor transparency, and a likeness that is simultaneously precise and lively. The portrait demonstrates that the artist who could paint a storm at sea could also paint a woman's face with equal skill and greater intimacy.