Works by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres

In his portraits Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres painted fabrics and details with exacting precision but idealised the faces, trusting that a face above such convincing clothes would be taken as just as true.

Ingres meant to be a history painter and trained in Toulouse, where Guillaume-Joseph Roques passed on his reverence for Raphael, then under Jacques-Louis David in Paris. His style was set before he left for Rome in 1806, and that year's Salon met Napoleon I on his Imperial Throne coldly. The emperor's small, pale face and hands nearly vanish among ermine, red velvet and gold.

Portraits kept him and his wife through lean years in Rome and Florence, and his name now rests largely on them. Comtesse d'Haussonville props her chin on her fingers, a pose that recurs in some of his women, before a mirror that shows the back of her head. Madame Moitessier stands in black against a dark red damask wall in 1851; five years later he painted her seated, in flowered silk, with her profile in a mirror behind.

Portraits make up the largest share of the works below, which are mostly paintings, but drawing came first for him: he began no painting before its drawing was settled. He took on The Duke of Alba Receiving the Pope's Blessing out of need, thought the duke a brute and never finished the painting; this drawing in brown ink and wash shows a man in armour raising a sword at the altar. The 1825 Odalisque, one of his few prints, copies La Grande Odalisque, whose back a critic found three vertebrae too long.

Sources: Wikipedia, Musée de l'Armée, J. Paul Getty Museum, Cleveland Museum of Art, The Frick Collection, National Gallery of Art, National Gallery.