page_title: Portrait of Baronne de Rothschild
section_title: Description
hierarchical_section_title: Portrait of Baronne de Rothschild / Description
caption_attribution_description: Français&#160;: Portrait de Madame Denis-Joseph La Live d'Epinay, née Louise-Florence Pétronille Tardieu d'Esclavelles, dite Madame d'Epinay
context_page_description: Baronne de Rothschild is an 1848 portrait by the French Neoclassical artist Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. The sitter, Betty de Rothschild had married her paternal uncle banker James Mayer de Rothschild and was one of the wealthiest women in Europe, and one of the foremost Parisian patrons of the arts. Her beauty and elegance were widely known and celebrated, and inspired Heinrich Heine's poem The Angel. For her portrait, which is painted in oil on canvas, Ingres sought to infuse symbols of her material wealth with the dignity, grace and beauty of Renaissance art, especially that of Raphael, while at the same time adhering to the command of line as practiced by Jan van Eyck. It is this combination which, according to art historians, places Ingres so far apart from his early modernist contemporaries.
  Betty de Rothschild's portrait is regarded as one of Ingres' most accomplished works, and has been described as "perhaps the most sumptuous yet approachable image of mid-nineteenth-century opulence."
context_section_description: Rothschild wears a pink satin evening dress with rows of ruching at the hem and lace frills at the collar and sleeves, trimmed with ribbon bows. Her hair is smoothed over her ears and she wears a black velvet toque decorated with ostrich plumes. She is seated on a red velvet sofa, with her arms and legs crossed in a relaxed manner. Ingres has captured her in this painting as if she were attending a soirée with friends.
  She is positioned unusually low in the pictorial plane, giving her a vulnerability at odds with the obvious stature offered by the heraldic inscription and coat of arms at the top right. The portrait is dominated two main elements: her wine-red satin robe and the charm of her facial expression and perfectly oval, almost idealised, face. While she looks out at the viewer with almost the same directness as Ingres' 1832 Portrait of Monsieur Bertin, the image is softened by the attractiveness of both her pose and dress. This warmth is contrasted by the sober and dull brown upper background, which serves to off-set the splendor of the sitter.
  In contrast to the Bertin portrait, which required of Ingres a prolonged struggle to arrive at the final seated pose, Ingres apparently settled on the basic composition of the Rothschild portrait at the very first session. The arrangement of Rothschild's upper body may have been partly inspired by a pastel by the Swiss artist Jean-Étienne Liotard, the Portrait of Louise d'Épinay (1759), which Ingres is known to have especially admired. The liveliness of Ingres' portrait is enhanced by the casual way the sitter leans forward over her crossed legs. According to the art historian Aileen Ribiero, "Madame de Rothschild's pose – the way she crosses her legs so that the shape of her knee can clearly be seen – might have been regarded as rather risqué, if we are to believe the etiquette books", which at the time cautioned that a woman should not cross her legs when seated.
  Many critics have noted Ingres' unusual use of light in this work; the shadows on her dress are rendered flatter than the lit areas of cloth, yet paradoxically lie just above them on the surface of the canvas. Typically, Ingres does not adhere to an anatomically correct representation of the visible parts of her body, which appear almost boneless and unusually bent and curved.
caption: Jean-Étienne Liotard, Portrait of Louise d'Épinay, pastel, 1759
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