Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres's 'Madame Moitessier'

This is a description of the portrait of 'Madame Moitessier' by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres which was completed in 1856. It is oil on canvas, 120cm high and just over 92 cm wide. It still has the imposing gold frame designed by the artist, heavily embellished with gilded flowers in relief, which echo the pattern of the sitter’s dress.

The striking three-quarter portrait of Mme Moitessier almost fills the bottom two thirds of the painting. A young woman with dark hair and eyes, she is seated on a pink, damask sofa wearing a spectacular floral silk ballgown. The lowcut neckline reveals her rounded shoulders and bare arms. She looks calmly out at us from a shadowy but opulent interior.

Her wide skirt which covers her feet, narrows towards her corseted waist, the bodice forming an inverted triangle as it widens to skim her shoulders. The top half of her body and the oval of her head are turned slightly to our right, but her eyes look directly at us beneath perfectly curving brows. Her pale pink lips curve with the hint of a smile and her eyes have a spark bringing her face to life. Her dark hair is parted in the centre and taken softly back from her rounded face into a white lace decoration trimmed with red ribbon. Her earlobes are revealed, which was both daring and fashionable for the time. Her left arm rests on the folds of her dress, and she holds a folded fan. Her right elbow rests on the back of the sofa, her curiously boneless looking right hand in a strange gesture, the tip of her forefinger touching her temple.

Her dress is a crinoline, the latest fashion in 1856, the skirt supported by voluminous petticoats which allow us no sense of the form of her legs beneath. The bodice is embellished with tassels and a bow with long trailing ribbons. The silvery coloured silk is patterned with flowers in blues, oranges and shades of red and pink, colours which are picked up throughout the painting, including on her fan. She has a large brooch on her bodice, and heavy bracelets on her wrists, all with huge stones in gold settings.

Light falls strongly on to her from above, making her pale skin luminous, and shadows create the rounded contours of her body. Ingres has used oil paint with such extraordinary precision it is hard to imagine it’s paint at all, the brushmarks scarcely visible.

Behind the sofa, to the left is a partial view of a red table with a golden base. On it is a tall Japanese Imari vase with a lid, patterned in shades of blue and orange. Propped against it, is a hand held fire screen with a slim, pale handle.

On the wall behind the sofa hangs a mirror, the muted reflection showing a partly open door, as well as the headdress on the back of Madame Moitessier’s head. However, it seems odd that her face is reflected in profile, which should not be possible given her position in relation to the mirror.

By the time Ingres was introduced to the 23 year old Ines Moitessier he was in his mid 60’s, the most famous and in demand French painter of his day. He and Madame Moitessier seem to have established an unlikely rapport, he referring to her often as ‘belle et bonne’, beautiful and good.

However the portrait took 12 years to complete, delayed partly by the birth of her second daughter, and also by the sickness and death of Ingres’s wife which left him devastated. The painting therefore evolved slowly and Madame Moitessier’s face has a strangely timeless quality. He did not paint her in situ which may account for the anomalies, including a tiny little figure of Cupid which tops the back of the sofa, mysteriously missing from the reflection in the mirror.

Yet Ingres shows he is capable of incredible technical and compositional complexity, conveying the presence of Madame Moitesssier with almost startling clarity.