In 1788, Jacques Louis David painted a full-length double portrait of the chemist Antoine Laurent Lavoisier and Marie Anne Pierrette Paulze Lavoisier, his wife and scientific collaborator, casting them as personifications of the Enlightenment. He set the striking pair in an elegant drawing room—evoking an apartment they occupied in the Paris Arsenal where Lavoisier had built one of the most well-equipped laboratories in Europe. The canvas is extraordinarily large—over 8 by 6 feet—a scale customarily designated for portraits of princes and kings, but one that Lavoisier no doubt thought fitting, as his experiments had thrust France to the forefront of 18th-century science.
