Portrait of Madame Marcotte de Sainte-Marie

Portrait of Madame Marcotte de Sainte-Marie was painted in 1826 by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres and depicts Suzanne Clarisse de Salvaing de Boissieu, wife of Marin Marcotte de Sainte-Marie. It is one of the earliest surviving portraits by the artist and one of the few portraits of women he produced in Paris after returning from Rome, a period when portraiture formed an important part of his professional work. The painting was shown at the Paris Salon of 1827, a sign of the attention it attracted from the public and critics of the time.

Preparatory studies for the picture are today held by the Louvre and by a gallery in Montauban, which allow us to follow part of the making of the work and the way Ingres built his portraits through preliminary drawings before arriving at the final version. This careful preparation fits the artist's working method, which placed great weight on drawing, the precision of contours and the clear definition of forms.

The painting belonged to its sitter until her death in 1862. It then passed to her son Henri Marcotte de Sainte-Marie and, in 1916, to his children. In 1923 the Louvre acquired it through David David-Weill, and since then it has been part of the museum's collection, where it can be seen today.

What makes the work interesting is its intimate, serene character, in which Ingres combines a careful attention to likeness with a refined treatment of the figure and background. For visitors, it offers a chance to see how the painter balanced fidelity to the sitter with the compositional clarity that defines his style in female portraiture.

Painter

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres

Date

1826

Medium

oil paint, canvas

Dimensions

93 × 74 cm

Museum

Louvre Museum, Paris

Genre

portrait

Depicts

Clarisse de Salvaing de Boissieu

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