Madame Edmond Cavé (Marie-Élisabeth Blavot, née en 1810)

The name on this portrait is a small trick of time. When Ingres painted the young woman around 1831, she was not yet Madame Cave at all. She was Marie-Elisabeth Blavot, wife of one of his own pupils, and an artist in her own right who exhibited at the Salon and later wrote popular manuals on how to draw. More than ten years passed. Her first husband died, she married a government official named Edmond Cave, and only then did Ingres add the dedication that names her by that later married name. A faint curved line on the canvas still marks an oval frame from the portrait's first life. In 1844 Ingres painted her new husband as well, a companion portrait meant to hang beside this one.