Portrait of the Abbe de Bonald

In 1816 Ingres was in Rome and short of money. Napoleon's empire had collapsed the year before, the commissions had dried up, and to pay his way he drew and painted small portraits of the French who passed through the city, many of them clergy come to the papal capital. This is one of the smallest, a panel barely 12 centimetres tall that you could cover with a hand. The sitter is the young Abbé de Bonald, from a family known for its hard opposition to the Revolution. He would go on to become Bishop of Le Puy and then Cardinal Archbishop of Lyon. An old note on the back records that Ingres painted it in Rome in May of that year. It stayed with the Bonald family for well over a century, and the Louvre only acquired it at auction in 1988.