Ritratto di Jean-Baptiste Desdéban

When Ingres painted this in 1810, he was a young French artist more or less stranded in Rome. He had won the Prix de Rome years before and come south as a scholarship pensioner at the Villa Medici, and then the money and the commissions from Paris largely dried up. So he lived in part on portraits of the French community around him. Jean-Baptiste Desdéban was one of them, an architect who had shared that same Rome sojourn as a fellow pensioner and become a friend. Ingres sets him in strict profile against a plain dark ground, the way he liked to fix the visitors who sat for him. The rust-brown coat and plain white shirt are drawn with the cool, exact line that Paris critics still found strange and kept calling gothic for years.