Charles Cordier

Ingres signed this in Rome in 1811. He was in his early thirties, living in the city on the state scholarship meant to launch a French painter's career, though his own was stalling badly. His sitter, Charles Cordier, was one of the French administrators running Rome for Napoleon, an inspector of the Domains in a city France then governed directly. Behind him is the countryside at Tivoli, and by the account of Cordier's daughter, Ingres did not paint it himself. That landscape was the work of his friend the painter Marius Granet, who specialised in such views. Cordier lived a very long life for his time, dying in 1870 at 92, more than half a century after he sat.