Françoise Duparc was one of the earliest and most significant female painters working in eighteenth-century France. Born into a family of artists, Duparc was trained by her father, a Marseilles sculptor, and the painter Jean-Baptiste van Loo at Aix-en-Provence. Duparc worked as a portraitist throughout Europe before returning to Marseilles in 1771 and joining the Academy of Fine Arts in 1776. The handful of confirmed paintings by Duparc reveal an affinity with the austere and moralising realism of the Le Nain brothers from a century earlier, which can also be seen in this image of an elderly woman dressed with severe but refined simplicity.