Bildnis der Madame Devauçay

In 1807 Ingres was in Rome, a young prizewinner sent to study at the French Academy, and Napoleon's reach was closing around the papal city. Within two years French troops would occupy Rome and arrest the Pope. The woman here belonged to that occupying world. Antonia Duvauçey was the companion of Baron Alquier, France's ambassador to the Holy See, and Ingres painted her with the enamel-smooth skin and boneless, curving arms that critics back in Paris kept calling strange. He gave her almost no setting, just a plum-coloured wall and a gilt chair, so everything rests on the steady, slightly cool way she looks back at you. The portrait later entered the collection of the Duc d'Aumale, a son of King Louis-Philippe, whose house at Chantilly still holds it.