Joséphine-Éléonore-Marie-Pauline de Galard de Brassac de Béarn (1825–1860), Princesse de Broglie

When it was painted

Around 1850 a young nobleman, Albert de Broglie, asked Ingres to paint his wife. A few years earlier Ingres had painted Albert's sister, the Comtesse d'Haussonville, and that portrait had been a great success. It now hangs in the Frick Collection in New York.

Ingres was nearly seventy and one of the grand old men of French art. He had run the French Academy in Rome and then come home to Paris. He saw himself above all as a painter of history and myth, and he often complained that portraits stole his time. Still, the aristocrats kept asking.

His own life changed a great deal in these years. His wife Madeleine died in 1849, and in 1852 he married Delphine Ramel. In 1853 he also painted a vast ceiling honoring Napoleon for the Paris city hall, which was lost when the building burned in 1871.

The portrait was finished in 1853, and you can just make out INGRES and that date halfway down the left wall. Pauline died seven years later, in 1860. Her husband went on to become a respected historian and, in the 1870s, prime minister of France.

The painting stayed with the Broglie family for more than a century. In 1958 the American banker Robert Lehman bought it, and in 1975 it came to the Metropolitan Museum with the rest of his collection.

Look again at the small coat of arms high on the right wall. The blue X on gold is the emblem of the Broglie family. The family that kept this picture for over a hundred years had its mark painted into it from the very start.