Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres

Cut in such a way as to result in an irregular edge made up on all sides with Japanese paper.
In 1815 Rome saw the collapse of the Napoleonic regime and the rise of the French government installed by the Bourbon Restoration. For artists active in the capital, there was a major shift in sources for commissions and opportunities for employment. For Ingres, it meant the disappearance of Murat family patronage and the need to cultivate a new circle of supporters. Although the artist was not particularly enthusiastic at this stage in his career about returning to producing portrait drawings, his graphite studies of officials, diplomats, and tourists from this period are among his principal graphic achievements. This elegant and skillfully arranged group portrait of a foreign diplomat's family is a testament to the artist's immense skill as a portraitist and his success during this interim period. In a few years, he would return to large-scale history painting.
The sitters are the wife and daughters of Johann Gottfried Reinhold (1771-1838), who, after the demise of Napoleonic rule, was appointed the Dutch ambassador to Rome and Florence. He was stationed in Rome between 1814 and 1827. Ultimately, Reinhold commissioned at least three portraits from Ingres: this group portrait and individual ones of his sister, Fraulein Susanne Reinhold (1816, Frankfurt, Naef 185), and his wife's sister, Fraulein Louise Ritter (1817, Naef 200). Reinhold's affinity for the arts was well known, and in 1838, an often cited, unpublished obituary described him as “more scholar than soldier, more man of the world than scholar, but in truth more poet than man of the world and scholar.”
Born in Germany, Reinhold was brought up in the Netherlands and served as a Dutch diplomat, first in Hamburg, where he met and married Sophie Amalie Dorothea Whilhelmine (called Minna) Ritter. Their daughter Susette (on her mother's left in the sheet) was born in Hamburg in 1808, and a second daughter, Marie (on her mother's right), was born in Berlin in 1810. Susette died in Rome in 1821; Marie, who married a Hamburg merchant, inherited this sheet. When Marie and her husband were visited in 1850 by Karl Auguste Varnhagen von Ense, he noted seeing “Portraits of Reinhold, the family, drawn by Ingres in Rome,” raising the possibility that a portrait of Johann Reinhold may have been made as well.
Ingres spent more time on this rare, complex group portrait drawing than usual. The artist typically visited the subject in the morning, studied their mannerisms during lunch, and then executed the portrait in the afternoon. He worked on specially prepared tablets with layers of paper wrapped around a cardboard center and finished with finely surfaced white English paper. The cushioning gave the artist a taut and resilient surface on which he could wield his pencil to depict the influx of Restoration politicians and their families.