Ritratto di Jean-Pierre-François Gilibert

Ingres was in his mid-twenties and not yet famous when he painted this friend from his home town of Montauban, around 1805. He had trained in Paris in the studio of Jacques-Louis David, the leading painter of Napoleon's France, and portraits like this of friends and family were how a young artist practised and earned a little. Gilibert sits in a plain dark coat against a bare ground, one hand resting on his thigh and loosely holding a folded pair of spectacles, his look serious and inward. Within a year or so Ingres would leave for Rome on a scholarship and stay in Italy for most of the next two decades. The portrait went home to Montauban, where it hangs in the museum that now bears his name.