Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres

Private Collection, France,
sale, Paris, Christie's, 1 April 2011, lot 109;
with Jean-Luc Baroni, London,
where acquired by the present owner

Hinged to the mount at the upper margin. Overall in good condition. There is a small repair on the left hand side of the sheet at the level of the man's lapel. Some very light staining along the right margin. Medium remains strong. Sold in a gilt frame
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This fascinating portrait was unrecorded until its reappearance on the French art market in 2011. It dates from 1814, an extremely eventful year towards the end of Ingres’s sojourn in Rome, where he had arrived in 1806. His father died in March, leaving Ingres to worry about the fate of his two sisters, still living in France. During the late Spring he left Rome for the first time, in order to go to Naples where he spent three months, primarily in order to paint Caroline Murat, wife of his patron the flamboyant king, Joachim Murat. Ingres never received payment for this work and the following year Murat was deposed and executed. Ingres had married Madeleine Chapelle in December of 1813 and announced the forthcoming birth of a child to his friend Charles Marcotte, in the Spring of 1814 but the child was stillborn in the summer. Life for Ingres was undeniably challenging after his tenure at the French Academy in Rome ended in 1811, but still Ingres stuck by his declaration: I would rather die miserably if necessary, than live in Paris, as if in a forest of assassins and thieves.¹ Here, Ingres’s soft treatment of the face, as well as the size of the sheet, compare closely to another 1814 portrait of an unidentified Seated Lady now in the Metropolitan Museum, New York,² and both drawings have a subtle informality, an air of ease and familiarity in the expressions which suggests that the sitters may have been friends to the artist, more than clients. Ingres’ portraits from these years in Rome, many of which, as he later declared, were done to earn a living, are surprisingly varied in technique and style given their uniformity of medium. This work belongs with those that concentrate on character, on the creation of a quite remarkable vividness of gaze and presence. Hans Naef catalogued more than 450 portrait drawings in his catalogue raisonné ­ a body of work which constituted one of the most glorious chapters in his [Ingres’s] career³ - but those dated 1814 number only 23. Eric Bertin, in a supplement to the catalogue published in 2001, listed a further fifteen, previously unknown, of which only one was executed in 1814 - Ingres’ portrait of his wife, Madeleine.⁴ At least seven of the known 1814 portraits are likenesses of members of the Murat family and the relatively small number of other drawings belonging to this rather critical year suggests that the artist was indeed only infrequently working to commissions. 

^1. Letter written in 1807, see H. Lapauze, Le Roman d’amour de M. Ingres, Paris, 1910, pp. 170-171.

^2. H. Naef,  Die Bildniszeichnungen von J.-A.-D. Ingres, vol. IV, Bern 1977, cat. 130.

^3. H. Naef, ‘Ingres’s portrait drawings of English Sitters in Rome’, Burlington Magazine,  December 1956, no. 645, XCVIII, p. 827.

^4. 'Premier état du supplement au catalogue Naef des portraits dessins par Ingres’, Bulletin du Musée Ingres, no. 73, 2001, pp. 27-31.