Madame de Lauréal and her son

Adèle de Lauréal, born in 1782, was married to the chief clerk of the imperial court in Rome, one of the French officials installed there after Napoleon annexed the city in 1809. Their salon was where the French artists working in Rome met, and Ingres was one of them. She is the reason he married at all. She steered him towards her cousin Madeleine Chapelle, a milliner from Guéret, and the wedding took place in December 1813. The canvas is small, 25 by 32 centimetres, and the museum treats it as a study rather than a commission. Its record notes that a date of 1840 attached to the picture does not fit the sitter's age, and places it instead in Ingres's Roman years, before 1821. The record adds that the two heads seem to have served him again for figures in the Apotheosis of Homer, the ceiling he painted for the Louvre in 1827. The picture reached Montauban in 1867, in the bequest Ingres left his home town.