The Dauphin's Entry Into Paris

Ingres painted this small history piece in 1821, during a long and financially thin stay in Italy, in the fashionable little manner people then called Troubadour, all careful medieval costume and jewel-bright colour. The scene is from real French history. On 2 August 1358 the young dauphin, the future King Charles V, rode back into a Paris that had risen against the crown, the city where the merchant leader Etienne Marcel had seized power and had been killed only days before. It was a commission with a personal thread. The man who ordered it, Amedee-David de Pastoret, had an ancestor present at that entry four centuries earlier, and Ingres painted him into the crowd, picked out in red.