Angélique

Before his large Ruggiero Freeing Angelica went to the Salon of 1819, Ingres worked out the heroine on her own, and this canvas is that study. There is no knight here, no sea monster and no rock, only a woman standing naked against a flat red ground, arms raised with the wrists together as if already bound, her head thrown back so far that her throat swells. That throat is what critics seized on when the finished picture was shown. They made fun of it, and one writer later called her an Angelica with goitres. Ingres kept the pose regardless, down to the long unbroken line from chin to breast. The study came to the Louvre in 1926, a bequest from the collector Paul Cosson.