François Marius Granet

Ingres had just arrived in Rome on his Prix de Rome scholarship when he painted this, and the sitter was no client but an old friend, François-Marius Granet, a fellow pupil from Jacques-Louis David's Paris studio who was also making his way in the city. Ingres set him outdoors, coat slung over one shoulder, against the Quirinal hill under a bruised Roman sky. It was the first of the open-air portraits he made in those years, and there is an ease to it that comes from painting someone you know. He gave the picture to Granet, who kept it all his life and left it in 1849 to the museum in their shared home town of Aix-en-Provence, where it still hangs.