Portrait of Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier and his wife by Jacques-Louis David

This is one of the grandest portraits of the eighteenth century, painted in 1788 when the thirty-one-year-old David was at the peak of his powers and had become the self-appointed standard-bearer of French Neoclassicism. Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier is known today as the founder of modern chemistry, for his pioneering studies of oxygen, gunpowder, and the chemical composition of water. In 1789, his theories were published in the influential "Traité elementaire de chimie". The illustrations in this book were prepared by his wife and collaborator, who is believed to have studied with David. Marie-Anne-Pierrette Paulze was only thirteen when her father, a tax collector for the royal government, married her to the twenty-eight-year-old Lavoisier. The couple's income and social standing came from Lavoisier's own position of "tax collector, which eventually led to his execution at the guillotine in 1794, during the French Revolution. His widow married the eccentric American inventor Count Rumford in 1804 but soon separated from him; she died in Paris in 1836.

Lavoisier's "habit noir", as opposed to the colorful suits of courtiers, was the customary, English-inspired dress of men who owed their rank to a profession or purchased office. Madame Lavoisier's muslin gown is characteristic of fashionable women of her day, neither exaggerated nor excessively modest. The interruption that provides the pretext for the portrait is as carefully staged as every other aspect of the painting, from the array of instruments that would not necessarily be used together, to the red velvet cloth, inappropriate for messy scientific experiments, to the expensive gilt furniture and the invented, though stately and restrained, architecture. Madame Lavoisier recorded an experiment in her husband's actual laboratory in a drawing made in 1790–91 (private collection), in which she includes herself in a pose that echoes that of her husband in David's painting.

Although the documents concerning the commission have not been found, David's payment of 7,000 livres is recorded in a receipt dated December 16, 1788. This was a huge sum: David had charged Louis XVI only 6,000 livres for "The Lictors Returning to Brutus the Bodies of His Sons" (Musée du Louvre, Paris). David had planned to include the Lavoisier portrait at the Salon of 1789, but it was withdrawn at the last minute and not exhibited publicly until a hundred years later. Although it has since become one of David's most famous works, and it is justifiably considered his finest portrait, it had no immediate impact on the artists of David's generation, nor on the generation of his students.