Portrait of Catherine Coustard, Marquise of Castelnau, Wife of Charles-Léonor Aubry with Her Son Léonor

Catherine Coustard (1673–1728), who came from a family of well-to-do cloth merchants in Paris, married into the Aubry family of wealthy middle-class civil servants and statesmen from Tours. Seated, smiling, with her son leaning across her lap, she’s the picture of contentment. Her fortunes, always good, had just improved at the time this portrait was painted. Her father-in-law, after serving twenty years as secretary to the king, had recently been made a nobleman, a great step upward in family prestige that this picture commemorates.