"Count Delaborde was, I believe, the first to remark upon this exquisite work. Writing of Ingres' drawings exhibited at the Salon des Arts-Unis in 1861, he says: 'The pencil portrait of Madame Destouche should especially be noticed--a drawing so masterly in its freedom, so fine in its picturesque quality, and in the originality of its costume.' And ten years later he wrote: 'This portrait is one of the most beautiful that Ingres ever drew.'
"Who then was this young woman who smiles so sweetly and takes such evident delight in her life and in her beauty? Possibly she was the wife of the artist Destouche, whose name figures on the list of David's pupils. Born in 1794, he must have married very young for Ingres to have drawn in Rome in 1816 a portrait of his wife, and yet the age of the lady here represented is quite suitable to that of a husband of twenty-two. Whoever she was, let us be grateful to her for having furnished Ingres with the subject for a masterpiece.
"She is truly elegant--Madame Destouche; her long gown, with its girdle just beneath the bust, is profusely trimmed with lace at the wrists and about the low-cut neck. A bit of delicate muslin, also edged with lace, covers her shoulders, and around her throat is a sort of ruff of plaited gauze, open in front to show the throat, around which is wound in a triple coil a chain with cross attached. As to her hat--it is a poem; a little peculiar, it may be, but charmingly becoming with its brim coquettishly turned up and with its high crown rounded like a cap beneath a cluster of nodding plumes....
"Never, perhaps, was the artist's delicate pencil more seductive, never did it more perfectly realize that physical charm of modeling which is like a caress, characteristic--as M. Roger Marx has truly said--of the creations of Ingres."
The family group reproduced in plate V, and now in the Bonnat Collection at Bayonne, is one of the finest examples of Ingres' work in pencil. It was drawn in Rome in 1818, and represents Monsieur Stamaty, consul at Cività Vecchia, with his wife and children. "The characterization," writes M. Galichon, "is delicately and accurately given. Each person bears the stamp of his or her own individuality and is strikingly true to life. In short, Ingres has here produced a masterpiece."