Estudios para Jesús entre los doctores

These are working drawings for a picture Ingres had been circling for most of his life. He first sketched the young Jesus among the temple scholars as a young man, and only delivered the large canvas around 1862, when he was in his eighties. Even then he kept refining the figures, and sheets like these date from 1866, the last full year he was alive. He died the following January at 86. Ingres was born in Montauban and left the whole contents of his studio to the town, which is why so many of his studies survive together there. On these pages you can watch him still adjusting a hand, a turned head, a fold of cloth, decades after most painters would have called the thing finished.