Painting of the Month

Ingres, 'Madame Moitessier'

Explore all the painstaking details of this painting and you can understand why Ingres' portraits were in demand.

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Madame Moitessier, 1856

Being so popular might not have always been a blessing for the artist; 'Cursed portraits!' he complained, 'They always prevent me from undertaking important things that I cannot do any faster, for a portrait is such a difficult thing.'

This would certainly seem to be one of those difficult portraits; although it was commissioned in 1844, it was not finished until 1856. Madame Moitessier's daughter Catherine was originally meant to be included in the painting, and claimed to remember sitting for Ingres: 'a large room that was quite cold. My mother had her hand on my head and I had to be very still. It was very boring'. She said Ingres became irritated with the three year old and threatened 'to wipe her out' of the painting.

By the time the painting was completed, Catherine was a teenager and had actually been removed from the composition. Meanwhile the fashions had changed and doubtless Madame Moitessier would have looked considerably older. However, seated aloft billowing folds of luxurious floral fabric and adorned with gem-encrusted jewellery, this wealthy bourgeois lady appears ageless.

Ingres’ close attention to detail is so captivating – and initially quite convincing – that it is tempting to believe that this was exactly how Madame Moitessier looked. But where are her wrinkles? Her flawless skin, which mimics the smooth surface of marble, seems too delicate for bones to shape it. The room too seems carefully furnished; is it a room devoted to comfort or more to social status?

Ingres, who was a great admirer of Raphael, exerted great influence on his contemporaries such as Degas, and future artists such as Picasso. It is the mismatches of 'Madame Moitessier' – and the distortions in the anatomy found in other Ingres works – that proved fertile ground for Picasso's imagination.

Find out more about 'Madame Moitessier' at this month's 10-minute talks – every Friday at 4pm throughout October.

Madame Moitessier

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres

1856