Portrait de Belvèze-Foulon

Ingres was 25 when he painted this, in 1805. He had already won the Prix de Rome that should have carried him off to Italy, but the state had no money to pay for the journey, so he stayed in Paris and took portrait work to live. Several of his sitters in these years were people from Montauban, his home town in the south, who came to sit for a young man they knew. Belveze-Foulon was one of them, and Ingres shows him as a fresh-faced fellow near his own age, half-smiling. Decades later, in 1844, the city of Montauban bought this early canvas for 500 francs. It became one of the first pictures in the museum that now carries the painter's name.