Portrait of Philibert Rivière

This was one of the first important commissions Ingres ever received. In 1805 he was about 25, not yet the grand old man of French painting he would become, and a Napoleonic court official named Philibert Riviere hired him to paint the whole family. Ingres gave each sitter a different shape of canvas, rectangular for the father shown here at his writing table, oval for the mother, and a tall arched panel for the teenage daughter, Caroline. That portrait of Caroline is the one the world remembers, partly because the girl died within about a year of sitting for it. The father's likeness is calmer and more official, a man of the new Empire posed among the papers of his office.