.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
Ingres’s ambiguous feelings towards the success of his portraits, which in his opinion kept him from greater things, is well known. He was, at the same time, deeply aware of his special talent in the genre, not in the least in drawn portraits, which he made in great numbers throughout his life – nearly five hundred are recorded. The ones of his closest friends and those from the early decades of the nineteenth century count among his best, as the present drawing attests.
Marie-Jeanne-Catherine Delaigle was an artist herself, serving in the household of Lucien Bonaparte in Naples, when Ingres portrayed her in Rome in 1811 in this work, offered here for the first time since 1954. It is not known whether she was already married at the time to the painter Jean-Pierre Granger, but there is no doubt Ingres and Marie-Jeanne knew each other through him: Granger was one of Ingres’s closest friends during his early years in Rome, and one year before Ingres had made a profile portrait of him, now at the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, inv. NGA 81.732 (Naef, op. cit., IV, no. 62, ill.). Granger painted a portrait of his wife around the same time (a work of rather less charm than Ingres’s drawing), now at the Louvre (inv. R.F. 1704). A large, more boldly executed drawing by Ingres in the Winthrop collection at the Harvard Art Museums has also been suggested to represent her (see Wolohojian, op. cit., no. 49, ill.).
Both pupils of Jacques-Louis David, Granger and Ingres competed for the Prix de Rome in 1800, when the former won the first prize; Ingres obtained it the following year. They left together for Rome in 1806, and remained friends until Granger’s death in 1840, the year in which Madame Granger also passed away. Ingres’s attachment to the family is evident beyond their deaths, however, as he was godfather of the couple’s daughter, Palmyre, known as Myrette. She was, among other things, a gifted pianist, accompanying Ingres’s violin, and he portrayed her in a drawing made the day before her marriage in 1843 (Paris, Maison de Victor Hugo; see Naef, op. cit., I, pp. 224, 225, fig. 3, V, no. 393, ill.). Another, much larger drawing of her, probably a kind of cartoon for a painted portrait, was recently rediscovered and acquired by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, inv. 2016.20 (P. Stein, ‘Portrait of Mme Paul Meurice (née Palmyre Granger): A Newly Discovered Study by Ingres’, Master Drawings, LV, no. 2, Summer 2017, pp. 147-52). The portrait of her mother presented here was owned by Palmyre, and later by her husband, the writer Paul Meurice, whose adoptive daughter sold it in the 1930s (see Provenance).
Reproduced by Félix Bracquemond in an etching illustrating a 1867 article on Ingres by Charles Blanc (see Literature), the portrait of Marie-Jeanne Granger was one of the earliest portrait drawings by the artist to achieve wide public fame, despite its technical restraint. Hans Naef, in his monumental catalogue raisonné on Ingres’s portrait drawings, remarks that ‘one cannot imagine a more richly and finely animated sheet’ (op. cit., I, p. 223). Indeed, in its graphic purity and loving depiction of a beautiful and accomplished young woman, Ingres’s portrait of Madame Granger finds its equal perhaps only in those of his own wife (see, for instance, P. Rosenberg, De Poussin à Cézanne. Chefs-d'œuvre du dessin français dans la collection Prat, exhib. cat., Venice, Museo Correr, and Toulouse, Fondation Bemberg, 2017, no. 72, ill.). It is works such as these that best illustrate Blanc’s description of the best portrait drawings by Ingres as ‘light as breath; but that breath carries the entire soul of the sitter’ (‘Le Salon des Arts-Unis’, Gazette des Beaux-Arts, IX, February 1861, p. 191).
Marie-Jeanne-Catherine Delaigle was an artist herself, serving in the household of Lucien Bonaparte in Naples, when Ingres portrayed her in Rome in 1811 in this work, offered here for the first time since 1954. It is not known whether she was already married at the time to the painter Jean-Pierre Granger, but there is no doubt Ingres and Marie-Jeanne knew each other through him: Granger was one of Ingres’s closest friends during his early years in Rome, and one year before Ingres had made a profile portrait of him, now at the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, inv. NGA 81.732 (Naef, op. cit., IV, no. 62, ill.). Granger painted a portrait of his wife around the same time (a work of rather less charm than Ingres’s drawing), now at the Louvre (inv. R.F. 1704). A large, more boldly executed drawing by Ingres in the Winthrop collection at the Harvard Art Museums has also been suggested to represent her (see Wolohojian, op. cit., no. 49, ill.).
Both pupils of Jacques-Louis David, Granger and Ingres competed for the Prix de Rome in 1800, when the former won the first prize; Ingres obtained it the following year. They left together for Rome in 1806, and remained friends until Granger’s death in 1840, the year in which Madame Granger also passed away. Ingres’s attachment to the family is evident beyond their deaths, however, as he was godfather of the couple’s daughter, Palmyre, known as Myrette. She was, among other things, a gifted pianist, accompanying Ingres’s violin, and he portrayed her in a drawing made the day before her marriage in 1843 (Paris, Maison de Victor Hugo; see Naef, op. cit., I, pp. 224, 225, fig. 3, V, no. 393, ill.). Another, much larger drawing of her, probably a kind of cartoon for a painted portrait, was recently rediscovered and acquired by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, inv. 2016.20 (P. Stein, ‘Portrait of Mme Paul Meurice (née Palmyre Granger): A Newly Discovered Study by Ingres’, Master Drawings, LV, no. 2, Summer 2017, pp. 147-52). The portrait of her mother presented here was owned by Palmyre, and later by her husband, the writer Paul Meurice, whose adoptive daughter sold it in the 1930s (see Provenance).
Reproduced by Félix Bracquemond in an etching illustrating a 1867 article on Ingres by Charles Blanc (see Literature), the portrait of Marie-Jeanne Granger was one of the earliest portrait drawings by the artist to achieve wide public fame, despite its technical restraint. Hans Naef, in his monumental catalogue raisonné on Ingres’s portrait drawings, remarks that ‘one cannot imagine a more richly and finely animated sheet’ (op. cit., I, p. 223). Indeed, in its graphic purity and loving depiction of a beautiful and accomplished young woman, Ingres’s portrait of Madame Granger finds its equal perhaps only in those of his own wife (see, for instance, P. Rosenberg, De Poussin à Cézanne. Chefs-d'œuvre du dessin français dans la collection Prat, exhib. cat., Venice, Museo Correr, and Toulouse, Fondation Bemberg, 2017, no. 72, ill.). It is works such as these that best illustrate Blanc’s description of the best portrait drawings by Ingres as ‘light as breath; but that breath carries the entire soul of the sitter’ (‘Le Salon des Arts-Unis’, Gazette des Beaux-Arts, IX, February 1861, p. 191).