Madame Désiré Raoul-Rochette 1830

Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres made this pencil drawing of Madame Désiré Raoul-Rochette in 1832. At this time, Ingres was committed to portraits that gave the sitter a noble air, so we might see this as a contribution to the cultural politics of post-revolutionary France. Ingres had been appointed to the Académie de France in Rome and these portrait commissions helped support his directorship. He returned to Paris as a celebrated artist, and the portraits he made then are some of his most iconic. There is a crisp, neo-classical formality in the way the sitter poses, and in the detail he gives to her clothing. She represents the new, bourgeois establishment, and Ingres here is documenting its consolidation. To understand this drawing better, we could examine the records of the Académie de France, and the illustrated fashion plates of the period. This would let us better understand the institutional forces that shaped Ingres' art and the social ambitions of his sitters.