Revealing Sketch of Madame de Pompadour

There were few women more careful of their image than Madame de Pompadour, one of the characters in my novel The Blue.

She was a beautiful and cultured 24-year-old year old when she met Louis XV in 1745 and became his mistress. But from the beginning she was surrounded by critics and would-be rivals. She needed to ensure that her royal lover saw her in just the right light. One of the ways she did that was commissioning portraits of herself looking fresh and radiant, exquisitely dressed.  But she was never just a beauty--she was a beauty with a brain, and she wanted that to be an emphasis too.

This portrait by Francois Boucher is one of my favorites. It's a sketch painted in 1750 and she's a bit more informal in it than usual. We're supposed to see that, holding her hat in one hand and picking up a bracelet with the other, she's just about ready to go out--perhaps to meet Louis XV.

There's a jumble of ribbons on the dressing table to underscore her feminity; a pile of books and sheet music lie on the floor to testify to her literary and cultural interests. Her little dog waits to see where she's going. And on the cabinet above are two porcelain vases. Of course porcelain was her passion. :)

She's an endlessly interesting woman, and one who I loved reading about and thinking about while writing The Blue.


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The Blue, a suspense story set in 18th century England and France, was selected by Town & Country as one of the Best Books of 2019. It is an editors' pick in the Historical Novel Review.