Portrait of Madame Ingres

An index finger resting against a cheek gives this portrait its quiet centre. Around it, lace spreads across pale skin, bracelets catch the light and a blue shawl breaks into long strands of fringe.

Ingres painted his second wife, Delphine Ramel, in 1859. The picture belongs to the Sammlung Oskar Reinhart «Am Römerholz» in Winterthur, Switzerland. ^[1]

Its combination of a close, conversational pose and elaborate dress makes it especially rewarding to look at slowly.

A face held between two hands

Delphine turns slightly across the picture while looking towards us. Her shoulders establish a diagonal, but her face comes round to meet the viewer. The resulting pose has a gentle twist: body and attention do not travel in quite the same direction. Her raised hand helps join them. The forearm rises from the lower left, the fingers gather beneath the chin and one finger follows the cheek upwards, bringing the eye back to her gaze.

The gesture seems simple until one follows its construction. Hand and face touch without merging into a single pale shape. The line of the finger remains distinct against the cheek, while the bent fingers make a small cluster of curves below the mouth. A dark ring adds a concentrated accent near the centre of this arrangement. Ingres gives the hand enough prominence to become part of the likeness: the way Delphine occupies the picture includes the way she holds herself.

Below, the other hand rests across the raised arm. This creates a second point of contact and closes the arrangement into a loose loop. Our attention can travel from the lower hand up the forearm, past the bracelet to the cheek, and then down through the shoulder and dress. The body feels settled within that circuit even though several parts of the pose turn in different directions.

Her expression is open to more than one reading. The mouth is closed, the head slightly inclined; the eyes give the impression of meeting ours without a conspicuous display of feeling. A viewer might find the pose thoughtful, sociable or simply comfortable. None of these responses establishes Delphine’s character. What the painting makes available is a carefully sustained encounter, in which direct eye contact and the supporting hand hold our attention together.

The glossy, centrally parted hair supplies another kind of order. Broad dark sections frame the forehead, contrasting with the lighter, more irregular lace beside the ears. Against these larger shapes, the eyebrows, eyelids and lips become small but decisive changes of direction. Looking from the blue folds back to the face, one notices how little movement the facial features need to carry.

Blue cloth, white lace and points of light

Colour structures the portrait as strongly as contour. The blue dress occupies much of its lower half, while the pale skin and white fabric gather around the face and shoulders. Behind them is a deep, dark ground. This limited arrangement allows quite different surfaces to remain legible without filling the setting with furniture or ornaments.

The blue changes as it passes across the body. Some folds make sharp, bright ridges; others fall into almost black recesses. Near the neckline, the cloth draws together into a firm band. Across the lower part of the picture, it opens into broader passages. Following these changes gives a sense of weight and direction even where the boundaries between dress and shawl are difficult to disentangle at first glance.

The fringe is particularly useful to the composition. Long dark-blue strands descend over the white sleeve on the right, giving a strong surface pattern to an otherwise pale area. They also connect the blue mass around the shoulder with the lower edge of the canvas. Their narrow, wavering lines differ from both the broad folds and the rounded forms of the arm. Three ways of describing shape meet in a small space.

The translucent sleeves behave differently again. Their outer edges spread beyond the arms, creating a soft, puffed silhouette. Within them, overlapping light and shadow suggest layers of thin material. In places the flesh remains perceptible through the fabric. The painted sleeve therefore has to describe both an object and something seen through it. That double effect helps make the skin seem solid while the sleeve appears airy.

Lace continues around the neckline and rises in ribbons beside the head. It links areas that might otherwise read separately: hair, cheek, neck and shoulder. The narrow strip across the chest gives a delicate boundary to the heavier blue dress. Near the face, the lace interrupts the dark hair with little light shapes. The same pale material takes on a different role according to what lies behind it.

Jewellery introduces a more concentrated brightness. The bracelets form bands around the wrists; the rings and brooch create smaller accents among fingers and folds. Their position matters as much as their apparent richness. A bracelet marks the turn from forearm to hand, while the brooch punctuates the area where skin, lace and blue cloth converge. These details help articulate the body rather than serving as a separate inventory of possessions.

Try looking briefly at the picture with attention fixed on its edges. The sleeves expand towards the sides, the blue cloth fills the bottom and the head has comparatively generous dark space above it. This gives the lower half a broad, anchored shape while allowing the face to emerge more freely. The close crop brings Delphine near, yet the surrounding darkness preserves a little distance. The picture balances those two experiences throughout.

Delphine Ramel and the family at Meung

Delphine married Ingres on 15 April 1852; his first wife, Madeleine Chapelle, had died in 1849. Charles Marcotte helped arrange the match. Hans Naef’s account recalls Delphine’s help with correspondence and her piano playing, giving a glimpse of the couple’s shared daily life. ^[2]

Ingres, Madeleine Chapelle, Madame Ingres, 1814. Graphite portrait. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2004.475.2. ^[3]

The painting’s domestic setting becomes unusually tangible in a letter printed by Henri Delaborde in his posthumous book on Ingres. Writing from Meung on 21 July 1859, Ingres described being surrounded by the family and the noise and charm of the children. He had brought objects to furnish a small studio there and intended to inaugurate it by beginning Delphine’s portrait. ^[4]

That brief account gives the work a place within the ordinary arrangements of a working household. A room had to be made usable; familiar objects had to be transported; painting continued alongside the presence of relatives and children. It also provides a useful distinction between the environment of production and the image that eventually emerged. The portrait contains none of that surrounding activity. Its dark background concentrates the encounter on Delphine alone.

The letter describes an intention to begin, rather than a day-by-day record of the painting’s progress. It cannot tell us how long a sitting lasted, which objects Ingres placed in the studio or what conversations accompanied the work. Its value is more concrete: it places the planned portrait in Meung in the summer of its dated year, and allows us to connect the finished, composed image with a particular domestic circumstance. ^[4] The Swiss collection identifies the picture as an intended companion to a self-portrait. ^[1] An intimate purpose could accommodate considerable formality. Delphine’s careful arrangement of hands, jewellery and fabric gives the encounter its shape, while the absence of a descriptive room keeps the setting from competing with her.

The drawings and a question of evidence

Ingres had drawn Delphine before making the oil portrait. Delaborde lists a graphite likeness signed and dated 1852, the year of their marriage. This provides a separate documentary anchor for the earlier portrait; it does not establish that the drawing was made in preparation for the painting of seven years later. ^[4]

A different sheet at the Fogg, dated 1855, shows the painting’s pose. Naef questioned its uniform authorship, suggesting additions to an original bust-length drawing. He distinguished an apparently original inscription from a second, false inscription misdated 1844. Its status as preparation for the oil portrait requires caution. ^[2] These are distinct objects: a documented 1852 likeness, a questioned 1855 sheet and the finished 1859 painting. They cannot simply be arranged into an uninterrupted sequence of preparatory stages. ^[2][4]

The visible painting offers a different kind of evidence. It shows how convincingly the raised hand, angled shoulders and crossing arms work together in the final arrangement. That is something we can examine directly, without assuming that every surviving related image records an earlier step towards it. For the broader place of such sheets in his practice, see Ingres’s drawings.

A companion portrait and its later relatives

The intended pendant—a picture made to accompany another—was Ingres’s 1859 self-portrait now at the Fogg. The Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp distinguishes this from both the 1858 Uffizi self-portrait and its own modified version of 1864–65. Its account connects the three late self-portraits with a photograph taken around 1855 by Gerotwohl and Tanner. ^[5] The Antwerp canvas is a separate object from Delphine’s original companion. ^[5] Those dates matter because reproductions of the later self-portraits can easily stand in for one another. The pairing gives her portrait an additional frame of reference, placing her likeness alongside the painter’s image of himself.

The relationship also encourages a more deliberate way of looking. Seen alone, Delphine appears to occupy a complete and self-contained world. Knowing that another portrait was intended beside her introduces a second imagined presence outside the edges. The raised hand and direct gaze still govern the picture, but the encounter now has a place within a pair. That context need not determine a single interpretation of her expression.

Testimony, reproduction and the painting’s afterlife

Naef juxtaposed Calamatta’s approval of the marriage with Étex’s hostility. These responses concern the couple, rather than this canvas. The painting was reproduced as figure 213 in the 1999 Portraits by Ingres catalogue. ^[2] The distinction matters when looking back from a familiar reproduction. A sitter’s biography, a critic’s feelings about the painter and the reception of an individual work are related subjects, but they answer different questions. Hostility towards the remarriage cannot tell us how contemporary viewers responded to the blue dress, the gesture or the finished likeness. The portrait repays attention without requiring those opinions to explain it.

The Swiss federal collection record traces ownership from Mme Albert Ramel, Delphine’s sister-in-law, through Galerie Paul Rosenberg in New York, where Oskar Reinhart bought it in 1924. It subsequently passed to the Swiss Confederation through Reinhart’s gift, recorded as 1958/1965. Today it belongs to his Am Römerholz collection in Winterthur. ^[1]

Its passage from family ownership through the art market to a collection also changes the circumstances of the encounter. The picture can now be approached independently of any knowledge of Delphine or the Ramels. Yet its most immediate means of holding a viewer remain specific: the dark hair against lace, the forearm rising towards the cheek, the blue fringe over a translucent sleeve. Those details give the work its presence before a name or a family history is supplied.