Like that other virtuoso of the rich and famous and their clothes,
John Singer Sargent, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres hated painting
portraits. It’s difficult, of course, to imagine two painters more
different: the prodigiously facile, seductive Sargent, who could
suggest the gleam of satin and pearls with slapdash, wristy flicks
of the brush, and the severe, reserved Ingres, no less adept at
conjuring up the trappings of luxury, but whose tense, evocative
line and polished surfaces seem to materialize without any evidence
of the hand. Yet these two acclaimed painters seem to have had a
similar clientele (allowing for the differences between their eras)
and to have shared a similar dislike of the portrait genre. “Cursed
portraits!” Ingres famously declared. “They always keep me from
undertaking important things.”

By important things, he meant the
impressive public decorations, narrative paintings, and altarpieces
that by the middle of the nineteenth century assured his reputation
as France’s greatest living painter—
uplifting scenes from
antiquity and mythology, recherché allegories and religious subjects
(not to mention weirdly voluptuous, flash-frozen nudes) rendered
with a geometric clarity and meticulous finish that embodied the
academy’s highest ideals. But if Ingres’s exalted position at the
height of his career was due to his “important things,” his
portraits were highly prized by his contemporaries. Portraiture
brought him, while he was still in his twenties, one of his
first important public commissions, and supported him during difficult times
when he was in his thirties. For his contemporaries, Ingres’s
portraits reinforced his