Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres

Glued at the four corners to an old sheet of paper once part of an album. A stain an the top in the middle and some slight darker discoloration at the top and the bottom possibly from an old mount. At the bottom corners some creasing of the paper due to the glue. Very little slight foxing especially at the bottom. Media fresh.
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This is one of four known drawings by Ingres deriving from his famous painting of the same title in the Musée du Petit Palais, Paris (fig.1), which was executed in 1817 and is widely regarded as a classic of le style troubadour.

The painted composition is very close to the present drawing, and in the same direction, unlike the other three related drawings, which are all in reverse.¹  This is therefore the only surviving, full compositional drawing in the same direction as the Petit Palais painting.  Much like the painting, the interior shown in our drawing recalls the “preciousness one might expect to see in the small Dutch genre paintings of Dou, Metsu and Teniers”.²  It is remarkable that Ingres has achieved this intimacy while simultaneously depicting a scene from the life of Henri IV of France.  The moment captured by Ingres is when the Spanish Ambassador enters the room to find Henri IV gallivanting around on the floor with his children, as his wife Marie de’ Medici, seated in the middle of the composition, looks on.

Though seemingly unpublished, the present work fits perfectly into the closely knit chronology of drawings of this subject, with its dating of 1821 suggesting that it came soon after the other three versions.  It seems very likely that, much like lot 180, the drawing was made by Ingres expressly as a gift for a friend, in this instance for le Chevalier Galiano, and that in doing so the artist chose to use as his source his original, much celebrated, Petit Palais painting.

^1. P. Condon, In pursuit of Perfection: The Art of J.-A.-D. Ingres, exhib. cat., The J.B. Speed Art Museum, Louisville, Kentucky, 1983, p. 88, figs 1-2, reproduced and sale, New York, Sotheby's, 10 November 1998, lot 57

^2. Condon, op. cit., p. 88