Grand Ladies

This is part of an article about this and another portrait at the Art Institute of Chicago on humanitiesweb.org:  "Two Portraits

The Art Institute of Chicago displays two portraits of the same individual. His name was Amedee-David Marquis de Pastoret. One is of an arrogant, self-possessed, rather conceited looking French nobleman. It was painted by Jean Auguste Dominque Ingres around 1825. The pose is formal, stiff, and aristocratic. The figure is dressed in a seemingly skin-tight black suit decorated with a bright red ribbon and the Legion of Honour cross. He is a man of considerable privilege and, despite the consummate skill evidenced in its rendering, one has the feeling this is a portrait of a man Ingres seems not to have liked very much. There is a truthfulness and reality to the work, but it is a mocking reality aimed at deceiving no one except the sitter, who apparently appreciated the portrait having so completely captured his own, inflated self-image. Yet the look of a demanding status seeker steeped in ludicrous pretension is all too evident.

Hanging not far away is another portrait, this one by Jacques Louis David, who happened to have been Ingres' art instructor and mentor. David's portrait is of a young mother in her early twenties, a woman of aristocratic bearing gazing warmly out at us as she looks up from her sewing. Next to her is a cradle. In it we see the top and back of her infant son's head. The baby is the same Amedee-David, the portrait, that of his mother, Madame Adelaide Anne Louse de Pastoret. The painting dates from 1792. Unlike the portrait by Ingres of the baby grown into an arrogant manhood, David's rendering is warmly sympathetic. It is uncharacteristically light and bright as compared to much of the artist's other work. It is also unfinished. The young mother sews, but without the benefit of needle and thread. We can only speculate as to what else David might have added in completing the work.