Jésus remettant les clefs à saint Pierre

By 1820 Ingres had spent years in Italy and was often short of money, taking commissions where they came. This one was tied to a French religious house in Rome whose church, Trinità dei Monti, was being repaired after the upheavals of the Napoleonic years. He painted Christ handing the keys of heaven to a kneeling Saint Peter, the apostle Matthew looking on as witness. Ingres worshipped Raphael, and the debt is plain here, in the calm frontal rank of figures and the borrowed gravity of an earlier age. The canvas is large, close to nine feet tall. Much later it came to Montauban in southwest France, the town where Ingres was born and where the museum that holds it now carries his name.