Amédée de Pastoret

The black coat takes time to reveal itself. At first it gives Amédée de Pastoret a compact, dark silhouette against the green room. Then its embroidered leaves begin to catch the light, spreading across his chest and climbing the high collar. His face, white shirt and widely spread fingers emerge from this restrained setting with unusual clarity. A red ribbon and elaborate gold sword hilt provide small, brilliant interruptions.

Painted in 1823–26, the portrait belongs to the Art Institute of Chicago. ^[1] Ingres establishes the sitter’s presence through the disposition of a body: the head held above the collar, one elbow thrust outward, the hands occupying different parts of the coat. Following those details brings us closer to how the portrait works, before its sitter’s history supplies another way of reading it.

Black embroidery against a green room

The coat occupies most of the lower picture, but Ingres gives its different surfaces distinct characters. The sleeve on our right is relatively plain. Light follows its upper edge, crosses a fold at the elbow and fades into the dark forearm. Across the chest, by contrast, the embroidery produces an intricate network of curling shapes. The pattern remains close in colour to the cloth beneath it; its visibility depends on tiny changes of light and shade.

This makes black an active part of the painting. It can appear smooth, recessed, patterned or almost lustrous within a very narrow range. The costume’s decoration becomes clearer as we continue looking. Its complexity rewards attention without breaking the large shape of the torso.

The Art Institute identifies the clothing as the embroidered black uniform associated with Pastoret’s service as an auditor in the Council of State, and the decoration at his neck as the Legion of Honour. ^[1] The white points of the cross and the red ribbon sit immediately below his face. Their position encourages the eye to travel upward along the centre of the body, from the embroidery to the collar and then to the head.

The green background helps hold this arrangement together. Broad vertical bands on the wall rise behind the figure; on the right, gathered drapery turns a similar colour into a sequence of folds. The wall appears comparatively still, while the curtain dips and gathers towards the lower corner. Between them, Pastoret’s bent arm produces a firm angular contour.

At waist level, horizontal strips of gold and grey panelling steady the room. These lines are partly interrupted by the body and the objects beside it. They give us enough architecture to recognise an interior without inviting us to wander through it. Our attention stays on the figure close to the picture’s surface.

Two hands, two kinds of movement

Pastoret’s right hand, on our left, gathers the front of his coat, with the thumb disappearing into it. The fingers make a small, contained shape. On the opposite side, the left hand spreads across his hip. The fingers separate into pale, tapering forms, and a gold ring catches the eye near the middle of their fan.

The two gestures create different rhythms. The tucked hand leads inward towards the embroidered centre of the coat. The open hand carries our attention across a plain dark area and towards the sword. Above it, the elbow makes the figure wider, claiming a substantial portion of the canvas. The apparent ease of the stance depends on this very precise distribution of shapes.

The hands also complicate the uniform. Official dress can make a sitter seem enclosed within a role, yet these gestures give the clothes the flexibility of something being worn. Fabric pulls around the grasping hand and bends with the forearm. The coat’s large dark areas connect the body, while the small white edges of the cuffs locate the wrists within it.

The face is quieter. The mouth is closed, the gaze directed towards us, and the brows remain sharply legible beneath the loose curls. We can describe the effect as reserved or self-possessed. Turning that impression into a verdict on Pastoret’s character would require a different kind of evidence.

The man wearing the uniform

Amédée-David de Pastoret lived from 1791 to 1857. He entered the Council of State as an auditor in 1809, served the Bourbon monarchy after Napoleon’s fall, and became a councillor of state in 1825. He was also a member of the Académie des Beaux-Arts from 1823. ^[3] These appointments give the uniform a particular setting: the portrait belongs to the years of the restored Bourbon monarchy, when Pastoret combined public office with a place in artistic institutions. Pastoret was a count when painted; he became marquis in 1840. ^[2]

His subsequent career crossed further political changes. After the revolution of 1830 he refused the oath to Louis-Philippe and supported the Bourbon claimants in exile. In 1852 Napoleon III appointed him a senator. He also wrote poems and historical fiction. ^[3] The composed figure in the painting therefore belongs to one moment within a career that moved through several regimes. Neither the sword nor the direct gaze can tell that whole story on its own.

A patron who helped Ingres obtain work

Pastoret’s relationship with Ingres extended beyond this commission. In his posthumous account of the artist, Henri Delaborde credits Pastoret with commissioning the small Entry of Charles V into Paris in 1820 and with helping secure the government commission for The Vow of Louis XIII. Delaborde places this assistance among the friendships and encouragements that sustained Ingres during his stay in Florence. ^[4]

That account gives the portrait an added intimacy. The man presented in official costume had used his influence to bring the painter work. The relationship involved both the possession of pictures and access to the institutions that commissioned them. The Art Institute also considers it likely that Pastoret helped Ingres gain admission to the Académie des Beaux-Arts. ^[1] “Likely” leaves room for the difference between a patron’s support and proof of the precise part he played in an election. Their first meeting is uncertain; surviving correspondence begins around 1818. Pastoret eventually owned seven Ingres works, including an 1822 portrait drawing of his wife. ^[2]

Ingres, The Vow of Louis XIII, 1824. ^[5]

Why the date runs from 1823 to 1826

The 1826 signature and inscription giving Pastoret’s age as thirty-two prompted the hypothesis of an 1823 start. ^[2] The Art Institute dates the painting 1823–26. ^[1] The inscriptions occupy very different positions. The sitter’s name and age appear high on the open wall, where they can be read without entering the crowded lower part of the composition. Ingres’s signature is tucked beside the chair near the bottom edge. One identifies the person shown; the other names the painter and supplies a date. Their separation makes each serve a distinct purpose within the picture.

Two studies catalogued in Montauban concern the torso and arm (867.363) and left hand (867.364). Letters reported in the 1999 catalogue confirm a 1,000-franc price in December 1824 and request Pastoret’s gloves. These do not establish three years of continuous work. ^[2]

These details direct attention back to the making of the portrait. The pose has to work at the scale of the whole body, but it also depends on small, specific things: the turn of a wrist, the projection of an elbow, the form of an accessory. The gloves resting on the chair belong to that second scale of attention. Their pale, folded shapes make a little counterweight to the luminous hands.

The chair also holds a roll of paper and a dark hat. The paper’s round end faces towards us, while its length rises diagonally behind the gloves. The polished brown chair arm curves forward beneath them. This small gathering of objects breaks up the lower-left corner without competing with the sitter’s head. Across the picture, the ornate sword hilt supplies a brighter and more vertical accent. The composition balances these two groups around the dark mass of the coat.

A public portrait with an anonymous Salon title

The painting appeared at the Salon of 1827 as number 575, Portrait d’homme—Portrait of a Man. Eric Bertin’s corrections to the 1999 exhibition catalogue establish that the Salon title did not reveal the sitter’s name. ^[6] That anonymous wording differs from the individual identity preserved within the painting itself. As Andrew Carrington Shelton reports, Jal and La Pandore recognised Pastoret and mocked his political and literary pretensions. ^[2]

The distinction is useful when looking at the pose. A hand on the hip, a projecting elbow and an elevated head can be read as confidence, formality or self-importance. The visible arrangement remains the same while the viewer’s knowledge and sympathies alter its effect. A portrait can supply the occasion for political judgement without making every judgement an explanation of the painter’s intentions.

Delaborde records a second exhibition in 1855. He also lists an outline engraving in the volume published by Magimel and lithographic reproductions by Belliard and Aubert. ^[4] These are reproductions after the painting, rather than evidence that Ingres made all the prints himself.

An outline version would necessarily change our experience of this particular portrait. The silhouette, bent elbow and spread hand could remain forceful, while the almost concealed embroidery would lose much of its dependence on subtle differences within black. Reproduction makes the arrangement portable, but the painted colour relationships remain essential to the original encounter.

From the family collection to Degas and Chicago

The portrait stayed in the family until Pastoret’s daughter died in 1890. Edgar Degas acquired it in 1897 and kept it until his death in 1917. ^[1] Durand-Ruel bought it for Degas; David David-Weill acquired it in 1918, before its passage through Wildenstein. ^[2] The Art Institute acquired the painting in 1971. ^[1]

The movement from a sitter’s family to another artist’s collection changes the portrait’s setting. A likeness made within a relationship of patronage becomes an object selected by a later painter. We cannot recover Degas’s experience simply by looking at it, but the work offers abundant reasons for a painter to linger: the management of black, the unequal hands, the economy with which a few objects establish a room.

Its frame has a history of its own. In 1999 Nicholas Penny identified the frame then surrounding Pastoret as an unaltered Parisian neoclassical example from the 1780s. His essay also cautioned that even a portrait’s first frame need not have been designed or selected by Ingres. ^[7] This older frame should therefore not be treated as a securely documented choice made by the artist for the completed painting in 1826.

That distinction encourages us to look at a framed portrait as an object assembled across time. The painted gold of the room belongs inside Ingres’s composition. The surrounding carved and gilded structure belongs to the picture’s material presentation, and needs evidence of its own.

A useful comparison: Marcotte d’Argenteuil

Ingres’s Portrait of Charles Marcotte d’Argenteuil, painted in 1810 and now in the National Gallery of Art, Washington, offers a revealing comparison. ^[8] Both men turn their faces towards us above high collars; in each picture, a pale hand stands out against dark clothing.

Marcotte’s hand hangs loosely over an orange-red support. His outer garment spreads around the shoulders in broad blue folds, and a yellow waistcoat brightens the area below his chin. Pastoret’s uniform gives the body a closer, more continuous enclosure. His left hand presses visually against the hip, and the elbow sets a clear angle against the curtain.

The comparison brings out how much a portrait’s manner depends on clothing and support. Marcotte’s draped garment and resting hand let the forms settle. Pastoret’s fitted coat, outward elbow and spread fingers keep the figure taut. These differences can be experienced directly in the paintings without assigning either man a fixed personality. They also make a useful entry into the variety of Ingres’s portraits: a repeated interest in hands, faces and fabric can produce very different encounters.

Ingres, Portrait of Charles Marcotte d’Argenteuil, 1810. ^[9]