Due to his fine painting technique Augustin's miniatures were extraordinarily time-consuming and expensive. Portraits showing female sitters were especially sumptuous as Augustin usually placed them in luxuriant interiors or in front of detailed landscapes wearing extravagant dresses and jewelry. Therefore it is not astonishing that a portrait of a lady often cost twice as much as a portrait of a gentleman.1 This rather austere portrait of a lady in a plain Empire dress in front a cloudy sky was comparatively cheap; still, it shows the artist's typical meticulousness in the modelling of the flesh parts, the brightness of the colours and the soft expression.2 According to his student Louis Mélignan, Augustin needed only three basic pigments for the incarnate parts: red, yellow and blue.3 Augustin strove to replace the often-used colours of animal or vegetable origin by more steady pigments.4 In fact, the colours in his paintings are better conserved than those in most other miniatures.