Note 63 — CHAPTER 3 FRANCE AND THE REST OF THE CONTINENT

Hittorff and other architects of his generation such as Henri Labrouste and Duban, who supported his proposal to revive the external polychromy they had noted on the Classical temples of Sicily, were closer in fact to Ingres than to Delacroix. Ingres in 1828 backed Labrouste’s controversial rendering of the Paestum temples showing external colour. Duban, one of the first to introduce polychrome decoration—the plaques of enamelled lava used in the entrance courtyard of the École des Beaux-Arts are his—was a close friend and on occasion a collaborator of Ingres. Hittorff collected paintings by Ingres and assisted him with the architectural backgrounds of his pictures, though that in the ‘Stratonice’, which gives perhaps the best idea of the sort of polychromy intended by these architects, was supplied by Victor Baltard.