Madame Leblanc

A gold chain makes a long loop across Madame Leblanc’s black dress; beneath it, a brilliant striped shawl spills towards the edge of the picture. Her face holds our attention above this display of colour and texture. Ingres painted Françoise Poncelle, known by her married name Madame Jacques-Louis Leblanc, in 1823. ^[1] The portrait invites a double encounter: with a woman looking steadily towards us, and with a carefully arranged world of surfaces, gestures and possessions.

A face above a field of black

The upper part of the painting is remarkably spare. A broad stretch of brown surrounds the sitter’s head. No window, distant landscape or architectural opening explains the room. Its emptiness gives the small distinctions in her expression unusual weight: the slight lift at the corners of her mouth, the reddish edges of her eyelids, the soft shadow beside the nose. Her eyes meet ours without the head being rigidly upright. There is a gentle inclination towards the right of the image, answered by the descending slope of her shoulders.

The arrangement of her hair is much more emphatic. A central parting divides the dark mass above her forehead, and glossy curls turn down beside her cheeks. The black bow on the left interrupts the rounded silhouette. Against this elaborate surround, the face seems relatively unadorned. Its colour is concentrated in the cheeks and lips, while the forehead, neck and upper chest form a broad pale passage.

Look at how that passage ends. The dress cuts across the shoulders, then rises and falls in shallow curves above the gathered bodice. Fine pale edging keeps the neckline from becoming an abrupt border between skin and cloth. Below, closely packed folds catch narrow slivers of light. The dress is black, but it is full of internal differences: smooth bands, ridges, small recesses and the sharper accents of ribbons. Ingres makes the eye work slowly through a colour that might initially seem almost featureless.

Her expression can suggest ease or composure. Those are responses to the painted face, however, rather than evidence of her private temperament. The same slight smile may seem welcoming when we attend to the eyes and more reserved when we notice how completely she occupies her own space. The painting permits both readings without supplying an anecdote to settle them.

Françoise Poncelle and the Florentine circle

The couple belonged to the former court of Élisa Baciocchi, Napoleon’s sister and Grand Duchess of Tuscany: Françoise had been her lady-in-waiting, Jacques-Louis her secretary. The Met describes the generosity with which they received Ingres in Florence. ^[2] They had married in 1811; Jacques-Louis subsequently worked as a banker. The Louvre’s account connects his financial position with his support for the painter. ^[3]

Christopher Riopelle’s catalogue entry places their introduction through Jean-Pierre Gonin in 1820. Leblanc commissioned the unfinished Venus Anadyomene before the painted portraits of 1823. ^[4] These works belong to a relationship that embraced different kinds of painting, rather than a single isolated sitting. The separate story of Venus Anadyomene follows that much longer project.

The visible setting makes the couple’s comfort tangible. Madame Leblanc sits in a wooden chair with curved arms. At the right edge, a pale tabletop and a gilded support introduce other kinds of reflective surface. Above them, flowers are partly cut off by the picture’s boundary. The objects never become a complete inventory of the room. They appear in fragments around the sitter, giving enough information to suggest furnished space while preserving the broad darkness behind her. Riopelle identifies the cashmere shawl’s embroidered E with Grand Duchess Élisa. ^[4]

This selective furnishing affects how we read her place within the scene. The chair supports her body and receives the shawl, while the table stands apart. Nothing obliges her to handle an object or perform a task. Her hands can remain relaxed; her gaze supplies the encounter. The richness of the surroundings is available to our inspection without becoming an activity she must demonstrate.

Gauze, gold and the two hands

The sleeves are among the best places to slow down. At the shoulder, dark fabric gathers into generous puffs. Lower down, the skin remains visible through thin black gauze. Across the long forearm on the right, diagonal folds make darker streaks over the pale flesh beneath. At the wrist, a dark bow and gathered cuff bring that transparency to a firm stop.

Several different boundaries overlap here: the outline of the arm, the outline of the sleeve, the edges of its folds, and the black dress beyond. They do not all coincide. That is what makes the sleeve convincing as something laid over a body. The gauze has its own loose shape even where we can follow the limb through it.

On the opposite side, the right hand hangs over the chair arm. The upper arm is sharply shortened by its angle towards us, while the fingers are presented at length. The curved wooden support is easier to trace than the course of the limb above it. This gives the gesture an appealing peculiarity: the hand seems close and legible, but its connection back to the shoulder takes a second look.

The left hand, near the lower right corner, extends the longer diagonal of the other arm. A gold ring picks out one finger. There is no corresponding flourish in the hanging hand; its separate fingers drop at different lengths against the dark chair. The two hands bring the figure into the foreground in different ways, one suspended and one resting.

The chain provides another route through the composition. It runs from the exposed neck over the opaque bodice and ends in an ornament low on the chest. Its tiny bright links make a continuous line across several kinds of darkness. Beside the free curves of sleeve and chair, it offers a more regular, gravity-bound curve. The eye can follow it without having to untangle the fabric.

Below, the shawl spreads out into orange, yellow, white and dark patterned stripes. Some bands descend almost vertically; others turn over folds or disappear into bunches. The repetition allows us to judge those changes. A straight stripe becomes a bent stripe when the cloth changes direction. Small floral forms continue across the bands, supplying a second, finer scale of detail. The shawl gives the lower part of the portrait both its strongest colour and its most visibly complicated surface.

A companion across the room

Jacques-Louis Leblanc’s portrait is also dated 1823 and belongs to the Met, where it is numbered 19.77.1. ^[2] Seen together, the two paintings offer particularly useful comparisons. His open book balances the objects around her chair; his white shirt makes a compact bright patch where her exposed shoulders create a much wider one. His red table covering is gathered at the lower right, while her multicoloured shawl occupies much of the lower left.

Both sitters look out towards the viewer. Their bodies are angled, and their hanging hands introduce a similar looseness into otherwise substantial seated figures. Yet the shapes are far from interchangeable. His dark coat forms a broad, almost continuous mass. Her puffed sleeves, narrow waist and long diagonal forearm break the black clothing into a more articulated structure. Comparison reveals how many decisions lie within the shared idea of a seated portrait.

The Met proposes that the paintings probably faced one another, because their lighting differs. This remains a suggested arrangement. It does not establish a fixed left-and-right position on a single wall. ^[1] Thinking of them across a room is useful: the separate gazes could each address someone in the space between them.

Ingres, Jacques-Louis Leblanc, 1823. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 19.77.1. ^[5]

From drawings to a revised canvas

Two kinds of drawing must be distinguished. The Louvre’s independent portrait of Françoise is inscribed to her husband and dated Florence, 1822; his drawn portrait is dated 1823. ^{[3] [6]} Riopelle describes her standing, arms folded. Preparatory sheets for the oil painting explore the seated arrangement; an early proposal included their daughter Isaure. Her separate painted portrait dates from 1823, although its dedication records a gift in 1832. ^[4]

One securely identified sheet at Montauban, MI.867.299, is catalogued as a study for Madame Leblanc and dated 1822–23. ^[7] The current Met account reports more than two dozen drawings investigating poses. ^[1] These records give a sense of sustained preparation without requiring every surviving sheet to perform the same function. The distinction between an independent likeness and a working study is explored further in Ingres’s drawings.

Using infrared imaging to investigate beneath the paint, conservator Charlotte Hale found further revisions. The chair arm began as a slender scroll, passed through a wider version, and reached its present form; Madame’s right arm was initially steeper. Underdrawing places an eyelid lower and includes an unpainted curl. Neck and shoulder contours were filled out, and the tabletop was first indicated higher. ^[8]

These findings make the foreground especially rewarding to revisit. The apparent relaxation of the hanging hand depends on the arm’s angle and the support beneath it. Altering those relationships changes how easily we can imagine the body occupying the chair. The final arrangement preserves a little ambiguity while giving the separate hand a clear outline.

Hale also explains a material difference between the companions. Madame’s figure uses the luminosity of a white ground, the preparatory layer beneath the paint; a red-brown layer occurs beneath her background. Her husband’s red-brown preparation extends across his picture, over a more granular ground. Her canvas has trimmed sides and a roughly 2.5 cm fill at the top. His has additions and a folded edge. Hale’s proposed sequence—husband first, frames selected, wife painted, husband adjusted—is plausible, rather than proven. ^[8]

A portrait seen alone, then collected as a pair

The family returned to Paris in 1832. Madame’s portrait arrived too late for the 1833 Salon and appeared in 1834, without her husband’s. Riopelle reports contemporary criticism of its distorted figure. ^[4] What may now seem an assured arrangement had once given viewers cause to object.

Henri Delaborde’s posthumous book on Ingres, published in 1870, records both the 1834 Salon appearance and the portrait’s return at the Universal Exhibition of 1855. It also notes an outline reproduction in Magimel’s publication. ^[9] Such a reproduction would offer a particularly different encounter with this image: outline can carry the long arm, chair scroll and looped chain, while the distinction between sheer and opaque black depends heavily on tone.

Degas acquired the pair in 1896. The Met’s account says he had first seen them in 1854 and regarded their purchase as an exceptional event in his collecting. ^[2] Riopelle identifies Durand-Ruel as the intermediary at the sale of Isaure’s collection; Degas retained the portraits until his death in 1917. ^[4] The Metropolitan bought them at his estate sale in 1918, using the Wolfe Fund. ^[2]

Their history brings two ways of encountering Madame Leblanc into focus. Alone, she can hold an exhibition viewer through the directness of her gaze and the strangeness of the foreshortened arm. Alongside her husband, the same details become part of a larger exchange of shapes and colours. Neither view exhausts the painting. Returning to the single canvas after seeing its companion makes the individual arrangement more distinct.