Portrait of Monsieur Bertin is an 1832 oil on canvas painting by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. It depicts Louis-François Bertin (1766–1841), the French writer, art collector and director of the pro-royalist Journal des débats. Ingres completed the portrait during his first period of success; having achieved acclaim as a history painter, he accepted portrait commissions with reluctance, regarding them as a distraction from more important work. Bertin was a friend and a politically active member of the French upper-middle class. Ingres presents him as a personification of the commercially minded leaders of the liberal reign of Louis Philippe I. He is physically imposing and self-assured, but his real-life personality shines through – warm, wry and engaging to those who had earned his trust.
The painting had a prolonged genesis. Ingres agonised over the pose and made several preparatory sketches. The final work faithfully captures the sitter's character, conveying both a restless energy and imposing bulk. It is an unflinchingly realistic depiction of ageing and emphasises the furrowed skin and thinning hair of an overweight man who yet maintains his resolve and determination. He sits in three-quarter profile against a brown ground lit from the right, his fingers are pronounced and highly detailed, while the polish of his chair reflects light from an unseen window.
Ingres' portrait of Bertin was a critical and popular success, but the sitter was a private person. Although his family worried about caricature and disapproved, it became widely known and sealed the artist's reputation. It was praised at the Paris Salon of 1833, and has been influential to both academic painters such as Léon Bonnat and later modernists including Pablo Picasso and Félix Vallotton. Today art critics regard it as Ingres' finest male portrait. It has been on permanent display at the Musée du Louvre since 1897.
Background
Louis-François Bertin was 66 in 1832, the year of the portrait. He befriended Ingres either through his son Édouard Bertin, a student of the painter, or via Étienne-Jean Delécluze, Ingres' friend and the Journal'''s art critic. In either case the genesis of the commission is unknown. Bertin was a leader of the French upper class and a supporter of Louis Philippe and the Bourbon Restoration. He was a director of the Le Moniteur Universel until 1823, when the Journal des débats became the recognised voice of the liberal-constitutional opposition after he had come to criticize absolutism. He eventually gave his support to the July Monarchy. The Journal supported contemporary art, and Bertin was a patron, collector and cultivator of writers, painters and other artists. Ingres was sufficiently intrigued by Bertin's personality to accept the commission.
It was completed within a month, during Ingres' frequent visits to Bertin's estate of retreat, Le Château des Roches, in Bièvres, Essonne. Ingres made daily visits, as Bertin entertained guests such as Victor Hugo, his mistress Juliette Drouet, Hector Berlioz, and later Franz Liszt and Charles Gounod. Ingres later made drawings of the Bertin family, including a depiction of his host's wife and sketches of their son Armand and daughter-in-law, Cécile. The portrait of Armand evidences his physical resemblance to his father.
Ingres' early career coincided with the Romantic movement, which reacted against the prevailing neoclassical style. Neoclassicism in French art had developed as artists saw themselves as part of the cultural center of Europe, and France as the successor to Rome. Romantic painting was freer and more expressive, preoccupied more with colour than with line or form, and more focused on style than on subject matter. Paintings based on classical themes fell out of fashion, replaced by contemporary rather than historical subject matter, especially in portraiture. Ingres resisted this trend, and wrote, "The history painter shows the species in general; while the portrait painter represents only the specific individual—a model often ordinary and full of shortcomings." From his early career, Ingres' main source of income was commissioned portraits, a genre he dismissed as lacking in grandeur. The success of his The Vow of Louis XIII at the 1824 Salon marked an abrupt change in his fortunes: he received a series of commissions for large history paintings, and for the next decade he painted few portraits. His financial difficulties behind him, Ingres could afford to concentrate on historical subjects, although he was highly sought-after as a portraitist. He wrote in 1847, "Damned portraits, they are so difficult to do that they prevent me getting on with greater things that I could do more quickly."