ブロイ公妃

Ingres worked on this portrait between 1851 and 1853, and you can feel the patience in it. Every surface is described exactly, the blue satin gown, the gold-embroidered shawl slipping off the chair, the pearls and enamel. The sitter is Pauline de Broglie, married into one of the great French families, admired for her beauty and painfully shy, and Ingres lets that reserve stay in her face. What happened afterwards gives the picture its weight. Pauline died of tuberculosis in 1860, only 35. Her husband, the duke, could not bear to look at it, and kept the portrait for the rest of his life hidden behind a curtain, lending it out only rarely. It stayed in the family for a century before the Metropolitan bought it in 1958. The lace at her wrists is painted so finely you can almost read the pattern through it.