The Princesse de Broglie

The blue dress reaches us before the face. Its bright folds spread across almost the whole lower half of Ingres’s The Princesse de Broglie, catching light in long, shifting streaks. Above this expanse, a woman rests her folded arms on the back of a golden chair and looks towards us. Her face is quieter than everything surrounding it. The longer we look, the more the picture’s brilliance seems to depend on the small interval between that still gaze and the restless fabric below.

Painted in 1851–53, the portrait belongs to the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Robert Lehman Collection.^[1] Albert de Broglie commissioned his wife’s portrait.^[1] Pauline, Louise’s sister-in-law,^[2] appears amid costly materials with the composed bearing of an aristocratic household, yet its strongest effects come from unusually intimate details: a shaded eyelid, the blue reflected on a hand, and fingers suspended above the satin.

Looking at Pauline

Pauline’s head sits within a large area of grey wall. The gilded mouldings make a restrained frame behind her shoulders, while a dark blue curtain closes the picture at the left. A low blue seat extends behind the figure. The family coat of arms appears high on the wall at the right, well away from her face; the painter’s signature occupies a lower, quieter position on the opposite side. There is considerable empty space above her, but very little below. Her dress presses towards the lower edge, while her head seems to have room to breathe.

Her pose combines a slight turn with a direct encounter. The centre parting and smooth, rounded masses of dark hair give the head a firm outline. One upper eyelid hangs more heavily than the other. The eyes do not quite repeat each other’s shape, and the mouth is closed without appearing rigid. Those differences keep the face from becoming a perfectly balanced emblem of elegance. They invite attention to this particular person.

The Met interprets the expression as reserve.^[1] That description gives the portrait a human context, although shyness itself cannot be established from painted eyes. The visible effect is more elusive: she meets the viewer without any large gesture of welcome, and her hands appear occupied with maintaining the pose.

The chair is essential to that pose. Pauline leans across its back, and its thick upholstery supports the meeting of her forearms. One hand disappears partly beneath the opposite arm, while the other drops into view, its long fingers spread against blue. Following those limbs is more complicated than recognising the general impression of folded arms. Lace obscures their upper beginnings; jewels interrupt the wrists; the dress absorbs the hanging hand into its folds. The arrangement feels graceful at a glance and slightly strained when traced slowly.

That tension gives the portrait much of its life. The body has to be imagined beneath sleeves, lace and the enormous skirt. The shoulders provide a clear beginning, but the fabric expands far beyond the narrow waist suggested by the bodice. We recognise a person inhabiting the clothes, while also becoming aware of the clothes as a separate painted construction.

A painting permeated by blue

The gown’s blue changes according to the direction and depth of each fold. Some ridges turn almost white; deep hollows approach the darkness of the curtain. Between them are cool silver passages and saturated bands of colour. The lace works differently. Its curling pale pattern remains visible over the darker sleeves, making a delicate screen between skin and satin.

Look especially at the hanging hand. Its colour is affected by the dress beneath and beside it. The skin does not occupy an isolated, flesh-coloured zone: it participates in the same light as the fabric. The gold upholstery offers a warmer counterweight, strongest where the curved chair back emerges below the wrist. Against these broad, changing surfaces, each pearl and metal setting is a small, sharply defined point.

The face is also less uniformly pale than it first appears. Warmth around the cheeks and mouth and cooler shadows around the eyes give it structure. Its relative calm results partly from its surroundings. The skirt is full of abrupt changes; the face turns through much smaller gradations. Looking back from the jewellery or the satin, we experience those subdued transitions more strongly.

A commission within the family

The connection with the Comtesse d’Haussonville gives Pauline a place within an extended family network. The Met places the work among Ingres’s portraits of Orléanist aristocrats.^[1] Here, the formal occasion absorbs our first attention. Looking at the portrait, we encounter a woman represented through a demanding social presentation: evening dress, jewellery, heraldry, and a carefully maintained pose.

Albert published her religious writing posthumously.^[2] She was also the mother of five sons.^[1] Family life and writing occupied her alongside the formal social role presented here. Remembering those activities changes our encounter with the image. The hands arranged over the chair belonged to someone whose life included books and children, though neither is illustrated in the portrait.

Painting had begun by June 1851; eye trouble interrupted a drawing in March 1852.^[2] His background letter describes painting at Pauline’s apartment, struggling with sunlight and the demands on his eyes.^[3] He worked at 90 rue de l’Université.^[2] The room therefore has a connection to the circumstances of making the picture, as well as a role within its composition. Its quietness can make us forget the activity required to construct it: a painter working from life while the light changes.

Delaborde printed the background letter with a June 1855 date.^[3] Tinterow corrects it to 19 June 1852.^[2] On 20 June 1853, Ingres told Charles Marcotte that the portrait was finished. He carefully qualified its success: relatives and friends had approved it, but the wider public had yet to see it. He intended to keep it out of general view until Pauline returned.^[3] There is something engaging about the gap between his satisfaction and his awareness that this first audience was a particular, sympathetic one.

The Met calls this Ingres’s final commission.^[1] The context is commissioned portraiture, rather than his work as a whole. His background letter promises to abandon portraits while making an exception for Delphine, his second wife, whose likeness Delaborde notes he painted later.^[3] His irritation makes completion here feel like release from an arduous obligation.

Ingres, The Comtesse d’Haussonville, 1845. ^[4]

How the pose was made

Look again at the relationship between the arms and the skirt. The arms occupy a small, clearly bounded area, but the sleeves disperse their beginnings into lace and folds. We can follow the hanging fingers to the wrist; farther up, clothing interrupts the body’s outline. Understanding how the body fits within that enormous gown is one of the picture’s pleasures, and one of its difficulties.

Conservator Charlotte Hale linked matching grids on nude and dressed studies to infrared lines across the canvas’s chest and left shoulder. A full-size charcoal arm tracing supplied transfer contours; the painted thumb and little finger narrowed. Infrared showed throat and bodice lines, but none in the head; absence cannot prove there was no drawing.^[5] Infrared reflectography can reveal carbon-based marks beneath paint; X-rays distinguish denser materials.^[5]

Ingres, Nude Study for The Princesse de Broglie, c. 1852–53. Graphite on squared paper. Musée Bonnat-Helleu, Bayonne; reproduced as figure 277 in the 1999 catalogue. The model’s identity is not established. ^[6]

Ingres, Dressed Study for The Princesse de Broglie, c. 1852–53. Graphite and red chalk on paper. Reproduced as figure 278 in Portraits by Ingres, 1999; location then unknown. Complete small reproduction. ^[7]

Ingres, Study of Arms for The Princesse de Broglie. Charcoal on tracing paper. Reproduced as catalogue 146 in Portraits by Ingres, 1999. Complete small reproduction. ^[8]

The nude study concerns bodily structure without establishing the model’s identity or showing that Pauline posed nude.^[5] A grid provides a practical way of keeping the relationships between parts when a design changes scale. Imagine dividing any image into squares: locating a wrist within one square and an elbow within another helps preserve their distance and direction. The curve still has to be drawn, and the surface still has to be painted. Measurement can organise an image without dictating the character of every mark.

Tinterow proposed tracing the painting.^[2] Hale’s later evidence supports transfer towards the canvas.^[5] That change in understanding matters because it changes the drawing’s role: from a possible record of work already done to an instrument for constructing the image.

Changes beneath the surface

Magnification revealed deep blue beneath thin or abraded grey, interpreted as local preparation. X-radiography showed narrower initial hair and a 2.5 cm yellow band at earring level, possibly an earlier moulding. The chair’s right contour expanded; black headwear covered chair and shawl.^[5]

On the surface we can see how forcefully those shapes organise the picture. The dark hair encloses the face, bringing the brighter skin forward. At the other end of the composition, the black accessory weighs down the lower corner. Between them, the gold chair describes a broad curve, echoing the curve of the sleeve above it. These are visible relationships in the finished image, whose balance we can experience without trying to reconstruct an earlier version of the room.

One useful way to look is to follow the silhouettes before attending to detail. The outside edge of the hair is simpler than the curls of lace. The chair has a large, rounded outline, while the fingers make a series of small downward points. Each kind of shape has its own pace. The picture moves between them without giving every part equal emphasis.

Silk, jewellery and things set aside

The accessories beside Pauline create a small still life of objects she might put on or take up. Pale glints punctuate the darker accessories. Some of these details emerge only after the eye has travelled down the chair. The pale gloves are particularly easy to miss, resting near its lower edge beside the dark folds and feathers.

Their different surfaces ask for different kinds of attention. The shawl’s gold ornament continues the warm colour of the chair, but its white ground separates one fabric from the other. The gloves make a second, empty version of the fingers hanging above. The fan’s fine structure contrasts with the headwear’s loose, dark feathers. These things extend the portrait’s interest in the hand: objects for holding, covering and adorning it surround the hand itself.

The jewellery is equally varied. Long pearl earrings flank the face; a gold pendant rests against the exposed chest. The bracelets make bright, interrupted bands around the wrists. Tinterow proposes Castellani for the Early Christian-style pendant.^[2] Its warm, rounded form and delicate surface are clear; the proposed maker remains uncertain.

Look from each small ornament to the wider surface around it: the scale of the marks changes abruptly. The pearls make isolated pale points, while the lace crosses the sleeve in a more continuous pattern. Both interrupt the broad blue folds without breaking the larger outline of the dress.

Tinterow considers the floral frame apparently original.^[2] Its ornament extends the picture’s presentation of richness. Within the painted rectangle, the setting is relatively spare. The dress, the arms and the chair can therefore carry an exceptional share of the picture’s activity.

Ingres, Madame Moitessier Seated, 1856. ^[9]

Admiration and disagreement

The studio display followed in December 1854.^[2] It appeared at the Exposition Universelle in 1855.^[2][3] A private likeness was becoming an image seen by people outside the family, who could bring their own expectations to its treatment of clothes, expression and social position.

Théophile Gautier admired the harmony between the pale, pearly arms and the blue satin.^[10] Edmond About interpreted Pauline’s pose and features as the expression of inherited nobility.^[11] These responses attend to different aspects of the same image. One invites us to experience a relationship between colours. The other turns outward appearance into a claim about the person’s social identity. The portrait certainly displays rank through heraldry and costly possessions. Whether the sitter’s bearing embodies nobility is a judgement about class, made by a viewer, rather than a quality we can establish from the position of an arm.

Perrier admired the head but criticised the blue reflection; Silvestre attacked the finger joints.^[2] These objections return us to passages that still slow down our looking. The reflected colour binds hand and dress together, but it can also make the hand look strange. The fingers form a flowing pattern, but that pattern can seem uncomfortable. We can find the picture convincing as a whole and still notice such local tensions.

Try covering the skirt with a hand or a sheet of paper while looking at a reproduction. The face and shoulders seem calmer when separated from the expanse below. Restore the whole composition, and the dress draws the eye downwards again. The relationship between these experiences is central to the portrait: the face sustains the encounter, while the fabric keeps changing the route by which we reach it.

Contemporary disagreement preserves a productive question about the painting. How far can elegance reshape a body before our attention shifts from the sitter to the painter’s design? The sharply described jewellery may encourage confidence in the accuracy of everything we see, while the arrangement of the arms makes us look more closely at the terms on which that confidence rests.

From a family portrait to the Met

Eric Bertin confirms Pauline’s death at Cannes on 28 November 1860, aged thirty-five.^[12] The Met records tuberculosis.^[1] Her death came seven years after the painting’s completion. Knowledge of it changes how many viewers encounter the portrait, but the pale complexion and uneven eyelids cannot establish her medical condition in 1853.

Albert reportedly covered it, yet lent it in 1867, 1885 and 1900.^[2] The two histories can coexist. A portrait could be painful to keep constantly visible at home and still be lent for public appreciation. The curtain story is a record of remembered mourning, not evidence that the painting vanished from sight for the rest of Albert’s life. Lehman’s 1958 Wildenstein purchase passed to his foundation in 1969.^[2] It entered the Met with the Robert Lehman Collection in 1975.^[1] The museum’s accession date therefore marks a later stage than Lehman’s purchase.^[1]

The move from family possession to a public collection changed the circumstances in which Pauline’s likeness could be encountered. Her identity, the marriage and the later mourning remain part of its history. At the same time, the picture offers a remarkably direct experience to someone who knows none of those details. The face holds our attention across the brilliant blue, and the hanging fingers keep drawing our eyes back into the painted fabric.