Amédée-David, Graf von Pastoret

Ingres began this portrait in 1823, the same year the young count sitting for it helped him win full membership of the Academie des Beaux-Arts. Amedee-David de Pastoret was about thirty-two, wealthy and well connected, and Ingres repaid the favour with three years of fastidious attention, from the exact line of the silhouette to the long fingers and the medal of the Legion of Honour the count had just received. What makes the picture travel oddly through history is who owned it next. In 1897 the painter Edgar Degas, a passionate collector of Ingres, bought it and kept it until he died in 1917. From his estate it eventually crossed the Atlantic to the Art Institute of Chicago.