Madame Guillaume Guillon Lethière, née Marie-Joseph-Honorée Vanzenne, and her son Lucien Lethière, Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres; graphite on paper; roughly 9 x 7″ (24 x 19 cm); in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY.
I’m a great admirer of Ingres’ sensitive pencil portrait drawings. This one is a bit unusual, more finished than most, and featuring a background of Roman architecture.
Simply gorgeous!
Thanks, Bill!
I’ve been studying art in Toulouse. Ingres sketches were my favorite, they are so accurate and delicate !
Thanks for the comment, Dessin réaliste.
Magnificent work. I’ve read that many of his delicate, detailed drawings were done with a 6H pencil, or the equivalent. Is that correct?
Thanks for the comment, Paul. I don’t know the relative hardness of the graphite he was using. I do know this was done only a few years after Nicholas Conté, an officer in the French army, started to combine powdered graphite with fine clay and firing the mixture in a furnace to produce a range of hardness. He called the resulting sticks Conté Crayons, an alternative to the chalk crayons more widely used at the time. (Modern “Conté Crayons” are actually chalks.) See my article on pencils.