Edmond Cavé (1794-1852)

This is half of a pair, and the other half came first. About ten years earlier Ingres had drawn and painted a small portrait of a woman named Marie-Elisabeth, then the wife of one of his own pupils. That pupil died, she married Edmond Cave in 1844, and Ingres painted the new husband to hang beside the picture of the wife he had made a decade before. Cave was worth painting: under King Louis-Philippe he ran the state's fine-arts office, the official who signed off on public commissions and purchases. Ingres built the likeness by transferring a careful drawing onto the canvas, the method he trusted more than working a face straight from the living sitter.