Two celebrated belles of mid-Nineteenth century Parisian society have been Louise de Broglie, Countess d’Haussonville, and Joséphine-Éléonore-Marie-Pauline de Galard de Brassac de Béarn, Princesse de Broglie. They have been “les belles-sœurs,” sisters-in-law, and every was immortalized in spectacular portraits by the famend French painter Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. These work now reside respectively at The Frick Assortment and The Metropolitan Museum of Artwork, and are emblematic of their establishments, regularly used as publicity photos, and beloved by guests.
Ingres, esteemed by students because the preeminent Nineteenth-century portraitist and certainly one of artwork historical past’s best draftsman, educated within the Neoclassical model below Jacques-Louis David. Constructing on this Neoclassical framework, Ingres developed his personal authentic, distinctive model. Drawing on parts of Romanticism and Center Jap designs, he created artworks which might be at all times refined and delightful. Ingres’ exact draftsmanship demonstrated his neoclassical coaching below David, nevertheless his stylized contours and anatomical elongations asserted his originality and set the stage for the later Romantic motion in artwork.
These basic stylistic qualities could be seen in Ingres’s brilliantly splendid portraits of the Countess d’Haussonville and Princesse de Broglie. These portraits have been painted within the latter a part of his life when he was on the top of his inventive powers.
The Charming Countess
Within the early 1840s, Ingres was requested to color the Countess d’Haussonville. At first, he was reluctant to take action, as he was uninterested in making portraits and as an alternative was eager to deal with extra bold, grand-scale work. Nonetheless, he discovered his topic irresistible and her household’s energy and standing persuasive, so he accepted the fee. The countess was an enthralling and very smart lady, the granddaughter of celebrated salon hostess and author Madame de Staël, and herself an achieved author, watercolorist, and musician.
The creation of the portrait started in 1842 and “Louise, Princesse de Broglie, Later the Comtesse d’Haussonville” was completed three years later. This drawn-out course of was typical of Ingres’s detailed, measured tempo and perfectionism. The artist started with a sequence of preparatory drawings, producing a large number of sketches that embody full-scale research of the countess’s left arm, her head, and its mirrored reflection. Within the ultimate portrait, Ingres depicts the countess with elongated proportions and an anatomically unrealistic proper arm that’s too low, however these have been deliberate inventive selections made so as to type a extra harmonious composition and create an unimaginable idealized magnificence.
Ingres depicts the countess in her luxuriously appointed boudoir. She leans towards an upholstered fire and seems to have simply returned from an evening on the opera. Opera glasses and a night bag lie on the mantel and her discarded wrap sits on a chair. These accoutrements and the room’s furnishings are as elegantly depicted because the sitter.
The work is a symphony of blues with accents of wealthy, heat reds and yellows—all created by seamless, exact brushwork. Her gold bracelet and ring are set with turquoise, bringing in one other shade of blue. Her snake-shaped ring is in a mode often known as “à la Cléopatre.” Egyptomania swept France following Napoleon’s turn-of-the-century Egyptian marketing campaign and continued all through the Nineteenth century and past, notably influential within the jewellery arts.
The countess’s considerate and beguiling gaze attracts the viewer in, but she stays tantalizingly enigmatic. The completed portrait was greeted by nice crucial acclaim and was treasured by the comtesse till her demise.
The Pious Princess
The grand success of the countess’s portrait impressed her brother, Albert de Broglie, to fee the artist to color his personal spouse just a few years into their marriage. Historical past repeated itself: initially, Ingres was reluctant, then he relented, and the ensuing portrait was acquired with reward and hailed as a masterpiece.
The extremely revered younger Princess de Broglie was famously shy, a pious Catholic, and writer of a number of Christian volumes. Ingres, in what was to be his penultimate portrait, reveals her piety by way of the cross pattée design on her necklace’s gold pendant. The pendant itself is formed like a bulla, an historic Roman protecting amulet. It could have been made by the Roman jeweler Fortunato Pio Castellani, who launched the archeological revival jewellery model within the mid-Nineteenth century, or by the French jewellery home, Mellerio dits Meller, based within the seventeenth century and the oldest extant jewellery home on the earth. Ingres personally chosen the pearl necklace the princess wore, exactly arranging its sleek drape. These jewels, together with the portrait’s seed pearl earrings and ruby and diamond bracelet, remained within the princess’s household for generations.
Key compositional parts within the portray of the countess are equally discovered within the princess’ portrait. Blue, once more, dominates the canvas, within the type of her beautiful satin ball robe, however right here it’s an icy shade whose coolness is offset by the silky golden chair. The massive crinoline underskirt acts like armor to forestall the viewer from getting too near the shy and inscrutable lady.
On this extremely personalised setting, the princess is elegantly posed leaning towards an object, this time a chair laden with a gold embroidered scarf, mother-of-pearl fan, gloves, and a black velvet cape trimmed with fringe, jet beads, and feathers. Ingres brandishes his virtuosic painterly ability in these magnificently rendered lifelike parts. The portray’s realism is balanced by deceptively flattened and elongated kinds. Galitz writes, “the virtuoso rendering of the a number of folds of her silk skirt, the tufted damask chair, and the marabou feathers of her hair decoration counter the mannered elongation of her arms, her seemingly boneless fingers, and her idealized face.”
The princess’s noble oval face, like porcelain, is dominated by deep-set eyes with an air of melancholia—prescient as just a few years after the portray was completed, she turned ailing with tuberculosis and died, abandoning her 5 sons and devastated husband, who had her portray draped in material the remainder of his life.
Museum ‘Poster Woman’
Each “Louise, Princesse de Broglie, Later the Comtesse d’Haussonville “and “Joséphine-Éléonore-Marie-Pauline de Galard de Brassac de Béarn (1825–1860), Princesse de Broglie” stayed of their households’ possession into the twentieth century. Throughout this time, the portraits have been often displayed in exhibitions and these viewings impressed well-known artists and the general public alike. After the demise of the countess’s youngest little one, her portrait entered The Frick Assortment by way of the Wildenstein gallery in 1927. The image has since graced the duvet of “Life” journal and is colloquially often known as the “Poster Woman” of The Frick. The princess’s portrait descended by means of her household till it, too, was bought by means of Wildenstein to the American banker Robert Lehman, who bequeathed his artwork assortment to The Met in 1958.
Ingres as soon as mentioned that portray a girl’s portrait was essentially the most troublesome factor to do: “It could actually’t be carried out. It’s sufficient to make one weep.” But for all his protestations and reluctance to take the Haussonville and Broglie commissions, he created charming portraits of two sphinxlike beauties who proceed to enchant us right this moment.
