Study of a man in profile with a view to the composition of Jupiter and Thetis

In 1810 Ingres was living in Rome as a scholarship student of the French Academy, housed at the Villa Medici, and he owed Paris a major painting to prove the years abroad had been worth it. What he was planning was huge: Jupiter enthroned while the sea nymph Thetis kneels to beg him to protect her son Achilles, a scene from the opening of Homer's Iliad. He built that great canvas out of careful separate studies, and this is one of them, a man's head worked out in profile. The finished Jupiter and Thetis reached the Paris Salon in 1811 and puzzled the critics, who found his figures lovely in line yet strange in their anatomy. The study and the vast painting it served now hang in the same museum in Aix-en-Provence, the Musee Granet.