Eye Candy for Today: Ingres pencil portrait of Mme Lethiere

Madame Guillaume Guillon Lethiere, née Marie-Joseph-Honoree Vanzenne, and her son Lucien Lethiere, pencil portrait drawing by Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres
Madame Guillaume Guillon Lethiere, née Marie-Joseph-Honoree Vanzenne, and her son Lucien Lethiere (details), pencil portrait drawing by Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres

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.

 
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6 Replies to “Eye Candy for Today: Ingres pencil portrait of Mme Lethiere”

  1. 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.

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