Мадам Ривьер

In 1806 the 26-year-old Ingres took a family commission in Paris: three portraits of the Rivieres, father, mother, and teenage daughter. This is the mother, Sabine, set into an oval and wrapped in white satin and a cashmere shawl, her arm curving to follow the round frame. Ingres sent all three to the Salon that year and then left for Rome, where he would remain more than a decade. The reviews were cruel. Critics found his smooth, boneless line cold and gothic, and he took it hard. He could not have known that the youngest sitter, 15-year-old Caroline, would be dead within about a year of posing.