Beauty embalmed in a painting

The Comtesse d’Haussonville — the topic of this portrait at the Frick Collection — was unusually attractive. She was also morbidly mindful of her influence on many others, maybe for the reason that she in no way obtained more than the death of her sister at 14. “I was destined,” she later wrote, “to beguile, to bring in, to seduce, and in the final reckoning to result in struggling in all those who sought their joy in me.”

© The Frick Assortment
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (b. 1780). Comtesse d’Haussonville, 1845. On see at the Frick Assortment.

Louise de Broglie, as she was continue to then recognized, was in her 20s when she satisfied the great neo-Classicist painter Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres in Rome. She fell in appreciate — not with Ingres, who was in his 60s, but with a portray in his studio — and asked him to paint her portrait. Even though Ingres had hoped that his times of portrait commissions had been more than, he reluctantly agreed.

Load Mistake

De Broglie was a cultivated woman of higher social standing. She experienced developed up actively playing piano, painting watercolors and attending the opera. Later on, in her 40s and 50s, she wrote a sequence of published biographies — which includes two volumes on Lord Byron, who had been shut to her grandmother.

That grandmother had been none other than Madame de Staël, the writer, political theorist and famed conversationalist who epitomized France’s brilliant modern society for the duration of the decades right before and just after the French Revolution.

De Broglie lived in Madame de Staël’s shadow. Her panic of under no circumstances very measuring up built her vulnerable to criticism. In her unpublished autobiography, she recalled that, at 9, she was informed that her character “had not sufficient nourishment in it to maintain a pet.” Her possess mom in comparison her to “a very vase without having handles.”

These criticisms clearly landed. “If you have often been criticized, from right before you can remember” writes Rachel Cusk in her new novel, “Second Put,” “it will become additional or much less unattainable to find oneself in the time or room right before the criticism was made.” Cusk’s narrator appears to be to painting to present relief from this self-alienated state: A fantastic painting, she suggests, may possibly set up a room for our real selves “when the relaxation of the time the space has been taken up since the criticisms obtained there initially.”

Was Ingres, as he painted de Broglie, making a place for her genuine self? Or was he up to one thing else?

The portrait sittings commenced in 1842. The painting took a few several years to finish, in the course of which time the upcoming Comtesse experienced her initial child. Ingres created around 80 preparatory drawings.

The completed function is stupendous.

It is also, you could say, an enormous lie: a illustration of a brilliant young woman that distorts her anatomy, captures none of her vulnerability, elides the make any difference of her being pregnant and new motherhood, compresses 3 several years into a fleeting moment and at the identical time converts a lively youthful lady into an unchanging figure of nearly oracular remoteness.

My god, although, what a lie! The portrait’s richness is almost orchestral. Its beautiful outcome arises out of a pressure concerning rampant substance factors (the photo groans with sensuous detail) and a deep substructure of abstract design and style. The a person element ties us to a specific second (Louise, house from the opera, has tossed her scarf on the chair and casually turns her head to fulfill our eyes). The other creates an ambiance of sacred, immemorial relaxed. The outcome is the aesthetic equal of plunging molten metal into iced drinking water.

Ingres seems to have poured his complete soul into de Broglie’s satin gown, the coloration of which matches her eyes. Other vivid details incorporate her blond eyelashes, her black opera binoculars, a bell pull that deviates tantalizingly from the vertical mirror frame and, mirrored in the mirror, a tortoiseshell hair comb.

From this, the pure symmetry of her facial area betokens celestial harmonies, though her determine is improbably — dreamily — sinuous. Ingres’s anatomical sleights of hand are usually remarked on: He sites de Broglie’s ideal arm, for occasion, at this sort of an angle that it could not probably link with her unseen shoulder. Likewise, the finger mirrored in the mirror shouldn’t be seen.

When an artist imposes this sort of extremes of formal rigor on a reasonable representation of another human becoming, you could start off to surprise about the marriage among our yearnings (for get, natural beauty, confidence, permanence) and actuality (which is inchoate, hideous, insecure and transient). Is it simply because we nurture the strategy of a “true self” that can transcend reality’s mess that we venerate art, in the perception that only artwork can create the area in which this self might exist?

I speculate, more specially, what it intended for Louise de Broglie, as she grew older, to have supplied beginning — through Ingres and her own potent will — to these kinds of a prosperous and immaculate variation of herself, destined to outlast her by hundreds of years. Did the portrait beguile and seduce her only to result in her to undergo, as she after considered she, on account of her youthful beauty, had been destined to do to many others?

We know only that as she aged, Louise grew to become preoccupied with dying and actual physical decomposition (her will, according to the Frick curator Aimee Ng, asked for that she be embalmed) and that she bequeathed the portrait — her previously self embalmed as art — to her daughter.