Eliezer et Rébecca

This is a young man's exercise. In 1800 Ingres was about 20 and studying in the Paris studio of Jacques-Louis David, and this small canvas is his partial copy after a painting by Nicolas Poussin, the Eliezer and Rebecca that hangs in the Louvre. Copying the masters was how a student learned, and the Louvre had opened its doors to the public only a few years earlier, in 1793, which put pictures like Poussin's within reach of any art student for the first time. The subject comes from Genesis: Abraham's servant Eliezer, sent to find a wife for Isaac, meets Rebecca at a well and offers her gifts. Poussin's calm, balanced grouping was exactly the classical order the David circle admired. The year after he made this, Ingres won the Prix de Rome, the prize that would send him to Italy for the studies that shaped the rest of his career.