Autoportrait à 24 ans

Ingres painted himself at 24, in 1804, a young man wiping a canvas clean with a cloth. He showed it at the Paris Salon two years later, the critics were harsh, and it stung. He never quite let the picture go. Sometime after 1850, by then in his seventies, he came back and reworked it: he turned the face away, changed the hand, traded the heavy jacket for a caped overcoat, and softened his younger features. So the face looking out today was repainted by an old man over his own youthful likeness. Modern examination has confirmed the original 1804 portrait is still there, sealed intact beneath the later paint.