Venus Anadiómena

Ingres started this in 1808, as a young man on a state scholarship at the French Academy in Rome, and then set it aside. He did not finish it for another 40 years, when a Paris banker asked him to complete the old canvas. By 1848 Ingres was near sixty and one of the most powerful figures in French art, yet the pose still looks back to his youth, to Botticelli's Venus he had studied in Florence. The banker who commissioned the finished work turned it down, unhappy with the drawing of the knee. Ingres sold it instead to a Louvre curator, and it later passed to the Duke of Aumale, whose collection became this museum at Chantilly.