Madame Moitessier, finger to famous temple, sits back on her rose satin chaise, dress spreading like an overblown garden around her. Chinese porcelain, silk fans, rubies, pearls and ormulu frames: her boudoir is a hothouse of ostentatious wealth. Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres painted Inès Moitessier in Paris, where she lived with her rich banker husband, a widower 20 years older. But Inès herself is ageless and timeless and as marmoreal as her incongruous reflection in the mirror – where she is elevated from living woman to Roman sculpture.
Ingres’s astonishing portrait, to paraphrase a winded Baudelaire, sucks all the oxygen from the atmosphere. It is one of the oddest images ever painted by an artist supposedly known for his superlative neoclassical precision. The arms are boneless, smooth as alabaster and yet somehow still supple. The raised hand is flaccid as a jellyfish. The bare body, encased in all those metres of stiff, flowered silk, is almost overwhelmingly fleshy, for all its marble perfection.
