On an oval panel Leah Bowen poses in front of a landscape. Smiling slightly she looks candidly out at the viewer.

Leah is an aristocrat and her status improved when she married Jean-Louis Vicomte de Vaudreuil in 1781. The artist emphasized Leah’s status and refinement by carefully describing her fashionable straw hat silk dress and gauze scarf collar and cuffs. Displaying her learning Leah places her right thumb in her book to mark her place as if she has been interrupted while reading. The artist adopted this obvious gesture often used in men’s portraits to illustrate women’s importance in French Enlightenment circles.