Le Vœu de Louis XIII

Ingres spent four years on this altarpiece for the cathedral of his home town, Montauban, most of it while living in Italy, and he was anxious about how it would land. He brought it to the Paris Salon of 1824 himself. The subject is old and pious: King Louis XIII, back in 1638, kneeling to dedicate France to the Virgin Mary, who appears above with the infant Christ amid the clouds. The whole picture is order, symmetry and cool clarity. At that same Salon hung Delacroix's raw, violent Massacre at Chios, and critics lined the two up as opposites. Ingres won. He walked out of 1824 acclaimed as the standard-bearer of classical painting in France, a position he held for the rest of his long life.