The setting is a sparsely decorated interior, featuring a tall bronze candelabrum fixed with an oil lamp, which has been extinguished and whose smoke drifts into the blackness of the space.

[1] Madame Récamier appears separate and distinct in her own space, a sparsely decorated setting with Classical furniture in the Pompeian style.

Recamier and David, she says 'je serai à vos ordres pour la séance", meaning "I will be at your service for the session".

[2] Only Récamier's head is completely finished, with great detail given to each lock of hair, which has been finely styled and arranged, as well as her porcelain cheeks dabbed with rouge.

MacColl, "from 1826 his unfinished Madame Recamier has spoken for something better in the Louvre, and since then a whole series of portraits have accrued which will prove his lasting security when 'Horatii,’ 'Sabines,’ and the rest have gone the dusty way to respectable oblivion".

In Creatures in an Alphabet, Djuna Barnes wrote of the subject as:The Seal, she lounges like a bride, Much too docile, there's no doubt; Madame Récamier, on side, (if such she has), and bottom out.

The 1805 portrait bears similarities to David's composition, yet is more saccharine and feminine, and emphasizes the Roman influences with a background of such architecture and garments.The work is not as coyly coquettish as David's; Récamier directly addresses her audience, gazing into the viewer's eyes with a downturned, sweet smile that radiates the gracefulness of her soft demeanor.

David, Gros, and Gerard were not the only artists to use Madame Récamier as a subject; the terracotta bust by Joseph Chinard of the Parisian socialite from 1801 similarly captures her elegance.

Twenty-first century artist Meredith Frampton directly borrowed the position of Madame Récamier for the pose of Marguerite Kelsey, a British model, in her 1928 portrait.

This sense of morbidity is counteracted with the humor of the piece, hinting at the inevitability of death and the ephemerality of life—a far cry from David's intended message with his original portrait.

[13] The series nonetheless conveys a powerful allegory of the delicate nature of human life, through intense visual contrast and typical surrealist darkness.