Portrait of the Artist's Father

Ingres painted this in 1804, when he was still in his early twenties and not yet the severe, polished portraitist he would become. The sitter is his own father, Joseph Ingres, a jack-of-all-trades in the provincial town of Montauban who painted, sculpted, and played music, and who had put a pencil in his son's hand before anyone else. You can feel the debt in it. Where Ingres would later render his paying clients with cool, exacting precision, here the brush is gentler and the face warmer. Two years after this he left for Rome on a scholarship and stayed in Italy for most of the next two decades. The portrait remained in Montauban, the town that now keeps the largest collection of his work.