Study for the Portrait of the Comtesse d'Haussonville

Ingres’s Louise, Princesse de Broglie, Later the Comtesse d’Haussonville (1845) in the Frick’s collection was the result of an estimated eighty preparatory drawings completed between 1842 and 1845. This sheet is among the fifteen of them that survive. Here, the artist focuses on details related to costume, especially the folds of the subject’s dress, through distributing highlights and shadows. Ingres includes an additional study of her skirt on the right. The second skirt buckles less as the figure leans against the mantelpiece, an architectural detail to which another group of drawings is devoted. The artist also experiments with a shawl draped around the sitter. In the painting, the shawl appears tossed onto a nearby chair.

J.-A.-D. Ingres, 1843/44–66. Étienne-François Haro, Paris, 1866–67. Ingres posthumous sale, Paris, April 27 and May 6–7, 1867 (?). Berthelot, Paris. Otto Wertheimer, Paris. Purchased from him by The Frick Collection in 1959.

Source: The Frick Collection: Drawings, Prints & Later Acquisitions. Volume IX. New York: The Frick Collection, 2003.