노인 데마레

Ingres painted this in 1805, at 25. He already held the Prix de Rome, the prize meant to send him to Italy, but the state had no money to fund the journey, so he was stuck in Paris taking portrait commissions while he waited. The sitter is a man named Desmarets, though which Desmarets is still unsettled. Scholars have proposed an engraver, a fellow painter, and, more startlingly, the man who ran Napoleon's secret police. The face gives little away. The picture's later history is stranger than its subject. It was among the artworks recovered in France at the end of the Second World War, works removed during the German occupation, and in 1952 the Louvre placed it on deposit here in Toulouse. It still hangs as national property, waiting for a rightful owner who has never been found.