Portrait of Comtesse d'Haussonville

[1] Highly educated, Louise de Broglie was later an essayist and biographer and published historical romance novels based on the lives of Lord Byron, Robert Emmett and Margaret of Valois.

[2] The painting is one of the few portrait commissions Ingres accepted at the time, as he was more interested in Neoclassical subject matter, which, to his frustration, was a far less lucrative source of income than portraiture.

He had made a preparatory sketch and had begun an oil and canvas version two years earlier, but abandoned the commission when de Broglie became pregnant and was no longer able to pose for the long periods he required, and she had anyway found interminable and "boring".

Ingres had two to three years earlier sketched her with black chalk as a preparatory drawing and begun an oil-on-canvas painting, which excludes the mirror and reflected images and reverses the pose, but that was abandoned.

de Broglie is shown fully frontal, looking out at the viewer with a demure expression, the intensity of which has often been compared to his later portrait of Madame Moitessier.

The central motif of both the final painting and its predecessors is her raised left-hand index finger, coyly placed by her mouth, and her sinuous, unnaturally elongated right arm.

[10] Following the death of Paul-Gabriel d'Haussonville in 1924, his descendants sold the painting to offset estate taxes[11] to art dealer Georges Wildenstein,[12] from whom it was next acquired by the Frick Collection for $125,000 in 1927.