Portrait de jeune homme à la boucle d'oreille

Ingres painted this in 1804, when he was 24 and stuck. He had won the Prix de Rome three years earlier, the prize meant to send him to Italy, but the state had no money for the journey and he was left waiting in Paris. He would not actually reach Rome until 1806. In the meantime he painted the people around him. We no longer know who this young man is. For a while some thought it was Ingres himself, partly because of the way the canvas is inscribed, but the full lips and dark curls do not match his own face, and no one who knew him remembered him wearing an earring like this. That gold ring in the ear may be a craftsman's sign; a note suggests the sitter was a young sculptor, a friend. The portrait hangs today in Montauban, the town in the south of France where Ingres was born and to which, at the end of his life, he left the entire contents of his studio.