Madame Moitessier

Ingres agonised over this commission for years. He had agreed to paint Madame Moitessier, a rich banker's wife he adored and called the beautiful and the good, but he kept setting the work aside, and her husband began to complain. By 1851, embarrassed, Ingres started again from scratch and finished this standing portrait in a matter of months, almost as an apology. She stands at a mantelpiece in a black velvet gown cut off the shoulders, a jewelled brooch at her chest, her skin left cool and poreless in the way that made his portraits famous. Meanwhile he was still slowly working on a second, seated portrait of the very same woman, which he would not complete until 1856. That one hangs in London. This one, the black dress, went to Washington.