Bildnis der Madame Panckoucke

Ingres painted this in Rome in 1811, a young French artist far from home on a state scholarship at the Villa Medici. He fits his sitter into a tight oval and gives every surface his cool, exact attention: the black lace, the gold bracelets, the sheen of the shawl, the enamel-smooth calm of her face. She was Cécile Panckoucke, born Bochet, married into a well-known Paris publishing house. There is a quiet family thread in the picture, though no one could have known it in 1811. Decades later Ingres would take as his second wife Delphine Ramel, a young relative of this same Bochet family, tying the painter for good to the people he portrayed here.