Portrait de Monsieur Bertin

Ingres painted this in 1832 and showed it at the Salon the next year, where it was praised almost without dissent. The sitter is Louis-François Bertin, then 66, who ran the Journal des débats, one of the most powerful newspapers of the age. He leans forward, hands spread heavily on his knees, filling the frame like a man who is used to being listened to. People at the time read him as the very image of the confident, moneyed bourgeoisie coming into its own after the revolution. Ingres agonised over it, made sketch after sketch, and said so himself. The pose supposedly came to him only after he watched Bertin settle into a chair mid-conversation. Picasso later kept a reproduction of this portrait pinned up while he worked.