Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780-1867) Madame Moitessier Samuel H. Kress Collection

“Never has beauty more regal, more splendid, more superb, and of a type more Junoesque yielded its proud contours to the sensitive drawing of an artist.” So the poet Théophile Gautier described Ingres’ first portrait of Madame Moitessier. But Ingres destroyed it because the lady’s daughter, who was included, would not stand still for him. He produced this second picture in 1851, after six months of careful work. It perfectly embodies both his exacting perfectionism and French elegance during the Second Republic.

Ingres was seventy-one years old when he painted this. Evidently he admired Madame Moitessier, for she was one of the very few people he consented to paint in his latter years. He dreaded the arduous demands he imposed upon himself when doing a portrait. “Art is never nearer perfection,” he said, “than when it resembles nature so closely that it might be mistaken for nature itself.” Yet for Ingres, nature had to be refined through the classical tradition of art, and he sought to cast Madame Moitessier in the form of an ideal figure by Raphael. Despite astonishing realism in the hair with its flowers, in the lace and the jewelry, our eyes move over graceful Raphaelesque curving lines, which dominate the face and figure. By such means Ingres strove to unite the real and the ideal.

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Canvas. 57¾ × 39½ inches Dated 1851

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