Baronne de Rothschild is a 1848 oil and canvas portrait by the French Neoclassical artist Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres. The sitter, Betty de Rothschild (1805-1886) had married banker James Mayer de Rothschild and was one of the wealthiest women in northern Europe, and one of the foremost Parisian patrons of the arts. Her beauty and elegance were widely known and celebrated, and inspired Heinrich Heine's poem The Angel. For her portrait, Ingres sought to infuse symbols of her material wealth with the dignity, grace and beauty of Renaissance art, especially that of Raphael, while at the same time adhering to the command of line as practiced by Jan van Eyck. It is this combination which, according to art historians, places Ingres' so far apart from his early modernist contemporaries.
Betty de Rothschild's portrait is regarded as one of Ingres' most accomplished works, and has been described as "perhaps the most sumptuous yet approachable image of mid-nineteenth-century opulence."[1]
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She first asked Ingres to paint her in 1841 when he was much sought after as a reluctant portraitist. His ambition lay in history painting which he believed was a higher form of art, while his living lay in commissions for the nobility. At this point he was financially comfortable and refused. Two years later, after meeting her at a ball finding her highly charming, he agreed to the commission. Yet the final work was not complete for another four years, after many abandoned studies, false starts[1] and breaks while he took time to work on other portraits -including his portrait of the late Ferdinand Philippe Henri the Duc d'Orlean who was killed in a carriage accident in 1842.[2]
Rothschild wears a pink satin evening dress with rows of rutching at the hem and lace frills at the collar and sleeves, trimmed with ribbon bows. Her hair is smoothed over her ears and decorated with ostrich plumes. She is seated on a red velvet sofa, with her arms and legs crossed in a relaxed manner. Ingres has captured her in this painting as if she were attending a soirée with friends.[1]
She is positioned unusually low in the pictorial plane, giving her a vulnerability at odds with the obvious stature offered by the heraldic inscription and coat of arms at the top right. The portrait is dominated two main elements: her wine-red satin robe and the charm of her facial expression and perfectly oval, almost idealised, face. While she looks out at the viewer with almost the same directness as Ingres' 1832 Portrait of monsieur Bertin, the image is softened by the attractiveness of both her pose and dress.[1]
This warmth is contrasted by the sober and dull brown upper background, which serves to off-set the splendor of the sitter. Many critic have noted Ingres' unusual use of light in this work; the shadows on her dress are rendered flatter than the lit areas of cloth, yet paradoxically lie just above them on the surface of the canvas.[3] Typically, Ingres has departed from anatomically correct representation of the visible parts of her body, which appear almost boneless and unusually bent and curved.[4]
The portrait was hung in Betty's salon until her death in 1886.[2]
