# Portrait of Doctor Alphonse Leroy [View the canonical artwork record]() ## Artwork - Artist: [DAVID, Jacques-Louis]() - Date: 1801-1850 - Technique: Oil on canvas, 72 x 91 cm ## Commentary David showed two portraits at the Salon of 1783, one of his uncle Desmaisons, and the other of Doctor Alphonse Leroy. Leroy was an obstetrician, and probably attended Madame David at the birth of her first child. David shows him as an intelligent and refined man, dressed in fine clothes, writing at his desk leaning on a volume of Hippocrates' Morbi mulierum \(The Diseases of Women\), lit by a quinquet lamp - a recent invention that gave illumination equal in strength to a dozen candles. The only less than successful part of the picture is the angle of the sitter's left arm that denies him a hand. ## Related artworks - [Allegory of the French People Offering the Crown and Sceptre to the King]() - [Andromache Mourning Hector]() - [Anne-Marie-Louise Thélusson, Comtesse de Sorcy]() - [Antiochus and Stratonica]() - [Belisarius Receiving Alms]() - [Bonaparte, Calm on a Fiery Steed, Crossing the Alps \(detail\)]() - [Bonaparte, Calm on a Fiery Steed, Crossing the Alps]() - [Brutus]() - [Christ on the Cross]() - [Consecration of the Emperor Napoleon I and Coronation of the Empress Josephine]() - [Consecration of the Emperor Napoleon I \(detail\)]() - [Consecration of the Emperor Napoleon I \(detail\)]() ## Attribution [Web Gallery of Art]()