Abstract: My dissertation investigates the artistic and cultural evolution of portraiture in Revolutionary France. During this crucial period of French history, portraiture both shaped and responded to debates about the nature of subjectivity and citizenship, the possible roles of men, women, and children in a new society, and the meaning of class in an unstable social hierarchy. In order to explain how portraits became so central to Revolutionary culture, I investigate both the material and ideological conditions that shaped their production. My study begins with a chapter exploring the physical, economic, and social geographies of the Parisian portrait market. My second chapter explores the problem of political portraiture through the lens of a series of print portraits of the deputies to the National Assembly. My third chapter addresses the peculiar visibility of professional actresses and their portraits. The fourth chapter, which considers the genre of portraiture in the landscape, centers on an 1798 portrait of the political leader Louis-Marie Revelliere-Lépeaux by François Gérard. The fifth chapter concerns the image of the family during the Revolution, and is constructed around a series of portraits and allegorical compositions by François Vincent. I have chosen my case study images to be representative of a wide range of art production, including not only oil paintings by Jacques-Louis David and his most famous students, but also the work of less familiar artists, both male and female, who produced portraits in other media, such as miniatures, prints, and mechanically-generated physionotraces. By addressing portraiture in all its modes, I have not only brought previously unstudied images to light, but have also reconstructed the social and economic exchanges inherent in the commission of a portrait, from the cheapest print to the most monumental family portrait. Moreover, my investigation extends beyond the portraits themselves to evolving definitions of selfhood during the Enlightenment, the political discourses of the Old Regime and the Revolution, and the emergence of a consumer society. My study thus not only contributes to art historical knowledge about portraiture in eighteenth-century France, but also offers a historical assessment of the political and cultural role of images during the Revolution.