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Ingres married the woman in this portrait almost sight unseen. Stuck in Rome and nursing a hopeless crush on a married woman, he let her steer him toward a cousin who resembled her closely, a modest dressmaker named Madeleine Chapelle. They courted entirely by letter, and when Madeleine finally travelled down to Rome in 1813 the couple met for the first time at the tomb of the emperor Nero, and married within weeks. He painted this the next year, in 1814, a hard year to be a French artist in Rome. Napoleon's empire was collapsing back home, the commissions and the official support were drying up, and Ingres was scraping by on portraits. This is the only oil painting he ever made of his wife, plain and close and unshowy. Their marriage held for 36 years, and she sat for him, as his model, again and again.