A young Italian woman, turned to the right

Dating from the first trip to Rome, the present tracing along with another more developed sheet at Montauban are copies after a lost composition possibly by Léopold Robert, G. Vigne, Dessins d'Ingres, Catalogue Raisonné de Musée de Montauban, Paris, 1995, no. 2801. The Montauban drawing outlines a landscape and the left hand of the sitter holding a spindle. Heightened with white, it is annotated with colour indications in Ingres' handwriting, but is not signed. The appearance of the present sheet bearing the usual signature found on tracings together with perspectival lines, suggests that Ingres was trying to create an independent work in the style of what was soon to become a very fashionable genre among travelling artists in Italy, rather than simply copying the work of one of his contemporaries.