The Last Ingres

Since most of the world-acknowledged masterpieces of painting are now safely behind museum walls, the few prizes that remain for big art hunters are all tagged, numbered and precisely located. A sudden blank space on the wall of one of Europe's castles, chateaux or palaces does not go unnoticed for long. Last week word quietly leaked out that what may be the prime catch of the years was quietly bagged last December by Manhattan Financier and Collector Robert Lehman, whose one-collection show at the Louvre's Orangerie last summer was the hit of Paris (TIME, July 1). The painting: Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres' masterful portrait, La Princesse de Broglie (see cut), for more than 100 years the possession of France's Dues de Broglie, now hanging in the dining room of Robert Lehman's Park Avenue apartment. Estimated price: $500,000.

Ingres began the portrait on June 16, 1851, when the princess was 26. She was a subject made to order for Ingres, who, French Poet Baudelaire noted, "depicts women as he sees them, for it would appear that he loves them too much to wish to change them; he fastens upon their slightest beauties with the keenness of a surgeon; he follows the gentlest sinuosities of their line with the humble devotion of a lover." The Princess de Broglie was not only a great beauty but a great lady, among whose descendants are some of France's leading critics, writers and scientists, including the present family head, Maurice, Due de Broglie and his brother, Nobel Prizewinner Prince Louis de Broglie, both atomic physicists and members of the Academic Francaise.

Not until two years after he first set pencil to paper did Ingres, then 72, interrupt the honeymoon of his second marriage to complete the painting. Every line of the light blue silk dress, each tuck in the dark blue chair covering, every fold of the yellow stole is lovingly recorded. The play of light in the ruffles and ribbons, the gleam of the rope of huge pearls at the wrist, and the light reflections on the pendant brooch are skillfully worked through. But Ingres' most consummate draftsmanship went into modeling the head, with its smoothly coiffured hair, its serene brow, aristocratic nose and demure mouth. Finished, it met Ingres' high standards, derived from classic Greek and Roman art; the subject stood portrayed devoid of any distracting sign of the artist's labor, smoothly polished, monumental and lifelike. Ingres was able to announce with satisfaction that it had been received "a I'applauso di tutti"

Collector Lehman's new acquisition is considered by some experts to be Ingres' greatest portrait of a woman. But what really makes the purchase a prime coup is that La Princesse is, in all probability, the last great Ingres portrait likely to come on the market.*

*Only two other major portraits are still privately owned: Baronne James de Rothschild, still proudly owned by the Rothschild family, and M. Devillcrs, now in Switzerland in the collection of Madame Emil Biihrle, widow of the famed munitions maker.

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