Ritratto di Madame Oudiné

Hippolyte Flandrin had just come home from years at the French Academy in Rome, a favourite pupil of Ingres, and this was the first portrait he painted after his return. The sitter, Antoinette Oudiné, was the young wife of a colleague from those Rome years, Eugène Oudiné, who engraved medals and coins. Everything here is stilled and squared away, her pose upright and near-symmetrical, her hands quietly folded, the whole picture an image of bourgeois modesty. It drew praise at the Paris Salon of 1840 and helped establish him as a portraitist. Portraits, though, were never quite where Flandrin's heart lay. His great labour would be the long religious murals he painted along the walls of Paris churches such as Saint-Germain-des-Prés.