Joseph-Antoine Moltedo (born 1775)

When it was painted

Around 1810, Ingres was about thirty and still living in Rome. He had won the Prix de Rome in 1801 and arrived at the French Academy in Rome in 1806. When his scholarship years ended, he stayed on. Back in Paris, the pictures he sent to the Salon were being called strange and awkward by critics.

Rome itself had changed hands. Napoleon's France had annexed the city, and French officials poured in to run it. Ingres made his living painting and drawing them. The Met presents this picture as one of a series of portraits of French officials in Napoleonic Rome, painted between 1810 and 1814.

So who is this calm, round-faced man? According to the museum, Moltedo was a Corsican, from the same island as Napoleon, and he directed the Roman post office from 1803 to 1814. He also designed a fire pump and a machine for weaving hemp, and he ran a lead foundry at Tivoli.

Scholars have not always agreed on which Moltedo this is. The 1954 catalogue of Ingres's works suggested the sitter might be an older relative, a deputy for Corsica in the revolutionary Convention. The 1999 catalogue of a major Ingres portrait exhibition argued instead for the deputy's nephew, Joseph-Antoine, born in 1775, whose age and standing in Rome fit the face. The Met uses that name.

When Napoleon fell in 1814, the French officials left Rome. Later, the Paris critic Théodore Duret sold it to the New York collector Louisine Havemeyer, and it came to the Met with her bequest in 1929.

Look at him again with that in mind. The Colosseum behind him is not a tourist backdrop. He is a man who kept the mail moving through an occupied city.