page_title: Louise de Broglie, Countess d'Haussonville
section_title: Portrait by Ingres
hierarchical_section_title: Louise de Broglie, Countess d'Haussonville / Portrait by Ingres
caption_attribution_description: English: Vicomtess Othenin d'Haussonville, née Louise Albertine de Broglie, figure study
context_page_description: Louise de Broglie, Countess d'Haussonville was a French essayist and biographer, and a member of the House of Broglie, a distinguished French family. A granddaughter of the novelist Germaine de Staël, she was considered independent, liberal, and outspoken. Her 1845 portrait by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, which took three years to complete, has been exhibited in the Frick Collection in New York City since the 1930s.
context_section_description: In 1838, two years into the marriage, Viscount d'Haussonville sought to have his wife's portrait painted by Franz Xaver Winterhalter, a favorite of European royalty, but Winterhalter was unavailable.  They next considered Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres; Louise and her husband first met Ingres in Rome in 1840, while he was directing the French Academy in Rome and living at the Villa Medici. They became convinced of his suitability to paint her portrait after viewing his recently completed Antiochus and Stratonice (today in the Condé Museum).
  At around the same time, Ingres, by then 60 years old and convinced his reputation would be secured through larger-scale undertakings, expressed dismay to a friend that "everyone wants" portraits. "There are six that I am refusing or trying to avoid because I can't bear them. Well, it was not to paint portraits that I returned to Paris." Although it is unknown whether Louise's portrait was among those commissions Ingres hoped to avoid, preliminary sketches indicate that by summer 1842 he had taken up the task. From the perspective of both painter and sitter, the process was not easy. Louise would spend months abroad at a time, and her sittings were interrupted by pregnancy. At least 16 preparatory sketches exist, as well as an early trial portrait in oil, and with dozens of drapery studies, some 60 extant Ingres works are thought to have informed the finished work. Ingres significantly revised Louise's costume and refined her facial expression, adding extensive notes to at least one working draft: "indent the nostril", "chin sharper", "eyeballs smaller", "nose narrower". He once told his pupil Amaury Duval that as difficult as portraiture was, women's portraits posed a particular challenge: "It can't be done", he said. "It's enough to make one weep." Ingres spent the first six months of 1845 working intensely on the portrait, which was finished by summer of that year.
  Art historian (and Frick curator emeritus) Edgar Munhall has suggested that both "Antiochus and Stratonice" as well as Ingres's portrait of Louise owe an inspirational debt to the pose of Pudicitia ("modesty" or "sexual valor"), a Roman statue of a goddess on display in the Vatican collection. In his book on Ingres, Robert Rosenblum connects her pose to Polyhymnia, muse of sacred poetry, hymn, and eloquence, as depicted particularly in the Louvre's Roman copy of a Greek original. Regardless of the specific inspiration, Ingres's portrait of Louise depicts a woman both modest and worldly, her gaze fixed on the viewer who seems almost to have surprised her, after her return from the opera, having casually removed her evening wrap.
  Many critics have noted the anatomical impossibility of Louise's pose, her right arm seeming to originate at her left shoulder. It would also be impossible to see Louise's raised hand in the mirror's reflection, though Ingres included it. Although many viewers have assumed Louise's portrait faithfully reflects contemporary fashion, recent scholarship has established that Louise's dress was pointedly out-of-style by the time Ingres painted her, as if to emphasize that the subject's intelligence and relative informality trumped her allegiance to fashionable trends.
  The painting remained in the family's private possession for eighty years, though it was displayed publicly on occasion.  Its first Paris exhibition in 1846 created "a storm of approval among her family and friends", Ingres wrote a friend, relaying in confidence that a prominent politician had written Louise saying "M Ingres must be in love with you to have painted you this way". The portrait was subsequently exhibited in 1855, 1867, 1874, and 1910, and was engraved in 1889 and again in 1910; it was also circulated in photographed form.
  Following the death of Paul-Gabriel d'Haussonville in 1924, his descendants sold the painting to offset estate taxes to art dealer Georges Wildenstein, from whom it was next acquired by the Frick Collection for $125,000 in 1927. It has been almost continuously on public display in New York City since the op
caption: Ingres, figure study, circa 1844
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