The Comtesse D’Haussonville
December 18, 2011
SEVERAL READERS expressed interest in Ingres’s famous 1845 painting of the Comtesse d’Haussonville, which I posted recently without comment. Though the image here does not do justice to the arresting colors and lifelike gaze, it’s still worth a second look. (Click on the image for a larger version.) The Comtesse’s marble white skin is so lovely in this ravishing blue gown against the blue mantel. Her unusual pose was perhaps inspired by classical statues of the muses. Her blue eyes, with unusually large pupils, suggest a penetrating inquisitiveness and detachment. She wears the most restrained of smiles and is not intent on proving bouyant happiness. On the mantle, in between the classical vases, there are a small pile of visiting cards and pots of pink and salmon-colored chrysanthemums, suggesting feminine busyness. Everything is exquisitely refined and yet she lends it an inviting warmth and unpretentiousness.
The Comtesse, who was born Louise Albertine, princesse de Broglie, was the grandaughter of Madame de Stael. She was the daughter, wife, mother and sister of members of the Academie Francaise and an accomplished historian and writer in her own right. She married when she was 18 and had three children. Here is an interesting 1985 piece about the portrait by John Russell of the New York Times. He writes on the occasion of a special exhibit devoted to the painting, which is owned by the Frick in New York.
As a portrait, it touches perfection, as much in its many passages of still life as in the unforced and meditative elegance of the standing figure. The sitter had the distinction of being the great-granddaughter of Jacques Necker, who had served Louis XVI as director-general of finances, and the grand-daughter of Madame de Stael, in her day one of the most fascinating women in Europe. But she was also a remarkable person in her own right and the author, among much else, of a two-volume life of Byron and an unpublished autobiography that is remarkable for wit, candor and breadth of perception.
She read all the new books. She went to the new plays (beginning with the celebrated first night of Victor Hugo’s ”Hernani,” when she was only 11), and to the opera, where she manifested better judgment than many a professional critic. (She was a pianist who had known Chopin.) She was a gifted watercolorist who could tackle scenes from high drama and not make a fool of herself.
Though fascinating, she was not at all puffed up. How many beautiful women would admit, as she did, that she had been accused at the age of 9 of having a character that ”had not enough nourishment in it to sustain a dog”? (The same severe critic likened her successively to ”a field mouse, a topaz, a roe deer, a blue fairy and a spark,” and told her that she should have a runaway horse as her true heraldic emblem.) Madame d’Haussonville never lost, moreover, the delicate sweet roundness of person that prompted her mother to tell her in childhood that she was ”a pretty vase without handles.”
Edgar Munhall, the longtime curator of the Frick, researched “the family history, sitter’s dress, the fashion plates of the day, the bracelet, the upholstered chimneypiece, the serpent ring, the comb, the shawl, the porcelain on the chimneypiece, the ormolu-mounted Oriental vases, the opera-glasses, the candle-sconce, the flowers in the cachepot, the visiting cards and even the bell push on its long and elegant rope” in preparation for the exhibit.
— Comments —
Jeff W. writes:
Where’s her cell phone?
Laura writes:
Impossible to imagine. Similar points were made in the previous post.
Hurricane Betsy writes:
At first I thought it was just me who found her right arm kind of funny. But then I found this in the LA Times:
Her sleeve-draped right arm passes behind her raised left forearm, the line continuing into the blue satin bodice that hugs her shoulder. Visually, Ingres connects Louise’s right arm to her left shoulder, a physically impossible switcheroo that has the salubrious effect of heightening the sense of folding one’s arms. The maneuver is echt-Ingres — a composition’s artful perfection, anatomy be darned.
With Ingres’ greatest portraits you find yourself seduced, then abandoned, then marveling at the painter’s amazing capacities to make you believe his fictions.
A reader writes:
You just know the Comtesse wouldn’t last long in a round with one of these. An especial contrast to the painting of the Comtesse is the photo of the woman in the feline print top and bikini bottom, with a chain-link fence and brick building behind her.
Laura writes:
A society of female body builders can’t produce a single Comtesse.
Hannon writes:
That has to be one of the most arresting visages of a woman I have seen outside of real life. I see thoughtfulness, intensity, feminineness and tenderness in her countenance. A thousand times more compelling than the Mona Lisa.
Laura writes:
Regarding Betsy’s comment, the strong diagonal created by her right elbow and left shoulder give the impression that she is leaning backward. The pose wouldn’t have worked without this. It would have looked unnatural for a woman to hold this pose unless she was leaning against something behind her.
Notice that the reflection in the glass doesn’t make sense because her hand would not have been visible in the mirror.
Lydia Sherman writes:
Try the pose in front of a mirror. I found it possible, even wouthout leaning against anything. Am I missing something?
Laura writes:
Actually, now I see the problem. If you try it yourself, your palm will face outward. The hand is wrong…. Then again, it can be done.
James P. writes:
I can just see the Comtesse in a marathon looking like her shorts fell off so she had to run in her underwear!
Laura writes:
On completely reading the piece by Christopher Knight in the LA Times, I see he is most concerned about the fact that her right shoulder is not present. He calls this a seductive fiction by Ingres. This is a trivial observation. Ingres could have created much the same effect if he had painted her right shoulder. He seems to entirely miss the impact of the painting, attributing it to color and her striking pose alone.
Diana writes:
Those bodybuilding freaks are on steroids. No human being, not even a male producing high testosterone, could be that muscular.
Regarding the beautiful portrait of La Comtesse, ever since I saw a photograph of the portrait, I have wondered how he mixed that unique icy-blue gray of the dress, and in the back of my mind, I have been looking for a dress of that color ever since. (Don’t ask how long.)
In reading about it since your first mention of the painting, I learned the meaning of the word “pudicity,” which is in a different part of the Russell article you excerpted. It even has a legal definition, but something tells me that’s dead as the dodo.
PUDICITY. Chastity; the abstaining from all unlawful carnal commerce or connexion. A married woman or a widow may defend her pudicity as a maid may her virginity.
Lydia Sherman writes:
My daughter’s theory is that the voluminous petticoats give the hand a resting place
It is possible in the mirror to do it.
But, that aside, the report came from the Los Angeles Times: what can you believe coming out of Los Angeles Times? It was the same rag that wrote the scathing report about women being unhappy at home. My opinion is that it was just a modernist’s typical slam at the old realists and Victorian painters. They are still tearing it down, just as they did as soon as the paintings were produced, sending some of the artists into hiding to paint in peace.
Mrs. Sherman writes:
The LA Times took a lovely painting and with deft words, made the public doubt the art and hate the artist, calling him a liar. If he’s a liar, then so is Picasso and every artist in the world. The problem is that people, rather than standing back and enjoying the full effect of the art, get up close and look at the brush strokes. They then get caught up in the imperfections of the brush strokes and fail to appreciate the paintings.
Hurricane Betsy writes:
Lydia writes,
The LA Times took a lovely painting and with deft words, made the public doubt the art and hate the artist, calling him a liar. If he’s a liar, then so is Picasso and every artist in the world. The problem is that people, rather than standing back and enjoying the full effect of the art, get up close and look at the brush strokes. They then get caught up in the imperfections of the brush strokes and fail to appreciate the paintings.
Sorry, but art critic Christopher Knight was very much within his rights to point out the oddness of the composition. I don’t feel manipulated by his comments. I don’t agree that Knight was incapable of “standing back and enjoying the full effect of the art”. I like the painting a lot, even though it is just on a little computer screen. I’d love to see the real thing in spite of that arm growing out of the torso instead of the right shoulder.
Here is what writer Julie Riggott had to say, partly quoting a curator:
Yet, despite the seeming perfection of the portrait, Ingres abandoned reality to suit his artistic needs – the Comtesse’s reflection is visible when it shouldn’t be, her right arm seems to originate from her ribcage rather than her shoulder, her fingers appear to have no bones. That approach would appeal to avant-garde artists like Picasso who played with reality and abstraction, said Leah Lembeck, the assistant curator at the Norton Simon who organized “Gaze: Portraiture After Ingres.”
I know this: it hits me like a thunderbolt, that right arm, and does “bother” me. (The fingers and impossible reflection don’t.) Just because we otherwise like a painting doesn’t mean we should pretend there isn’t something strange going on. Nobody is saying that painting have to be as realistic as photos, only that one comes to expect this more from later artists, that’s all.
Laura writes:
It is not a question of whether Christopher Knight was “within his rights” in his critique. Of course he was. The question is whether he was doing the portrait justice. It is interesting how Ingres disregarded strict realism to convey his conception of the Comtesse here, but Knight makes too big a deal of his anatomically-incorrect devices. And so does Lembeck. Ingres did not abandon reality. The comparison with Picasso is off-base. Ingres’s decision to leave out her right shoulder enhances her smallness and makes her pensive stance and face, so vividly real, the focal point.
