Mademoiselle Caroline Rivière

[2] Although Ingres favoured subject matter drawn from history or Greek legend, at this early stage in his career, he earned his living mainly through commissions from wealthy patrons.

The background is not deeply portrayed; the perspective is shallow and rises, according to the art historian Robert Rosenblum, in "flattened horizontal tiers against which the figure seems crisply silhouetted as if in low relief.

[1][4] It was, along with Ingres's two other portrayals of the family, exhibited at the Salon of 1806, but was poorly received for its perceived "Gothicness" (due to its precision of line and enamel finish) and its similarity to Jan van Eyck and other artists of Early Netherlandish painting (in French "Les Primitifs Flamands") who at the time were only just being rediscovered.

[3] In 2003, the art critic Jonathan Jones remarked of the painting: The sexuality Ingres usually reserved for harem fantasies slips over into the real and respectable world in this charged portrait.

His obviously intense visual relationship with his subject and his contentment to look, with a clinical waxy fetishism, at Mademoiselle Rivière's full lips, bared neck, long gloves and spectacularly serpentine boa, lend this picture drama.