Description
The painting is signed, in capital text, J.Ingres Pinxit 1832 at top left, with L.F. Bertin, also in capitals, inscribed at top right.
Bertin is shown in three-quarter profile against a gold–brown background lit from his right. He is seated in a chair, the arms of which reflect light from the upper left of the canvas. His fingers are spread on his knees and his hair is grey or nearly white. His massive bulk is stuffed into a tight black jacket, black trousers and brown satin waistcoat, with a white shirt and cravat showing at his open neck. He wears a gold watch and has a pair of glasses in his right pocket. In the view of art critic Robert Rosenblum, his "nearly ferocious presence" is accentuated by the apparently constrained space he occupies. His chair and clothes appear almost too small to contain him. His coiled, stubby fingers rest on his thighs and barely protrude from the sleeves of his jacket, while his neck cannot be seen above his narrow starched white collar. The Greek meander pattern at the bottom of the wall seems unusually close to the picture plane, confining him further. The wall is painted in an abstract gold, which according to critic Robert Lubar adds to the sense of a monumental portrait of a modern icon.
Bertin leans slightly forward. His manner is imposing and he confronts the viewer with a hard, knowing and ironic stare. He appears about to speak, his facial expression seemingly etched with the certainty of the argument he is about to put forward. Perhaps influenced by Poussin's Self-Portrait with Allegory of Painting (1650), Ingres has minutely detailed the veins and wrinkles of Bertin's face.
The painting is highly symmetrical, and divides horizontally. The most obvious marker of symmetry is his mouth, which turns downwards at the left and upwards at the right. This break in expression is intended to show the duality of his personality: on the one hand a hard-nosed businessman, on the other a liberal patron of the arts. His heavily lidded eyes are circled by the oppositely curled rounded twists of his white collar, and the twists of his hair, eyebrows and eyelids.
Ingres later added the reflection of the window seen on the rim of Bertin's chair. It is a barely discernible detail, but in its reduced size attempts to supply more pictorial depth than such devices normally strive for. It has been identified as a direct reference to Raphael's Portrait of Pope Leo X (c. 1519), in which a window is reflected in the gilded pommel of the pope's chair.
The painting is rendered almost exclusively in blacks, grays and browns, with the exceptions of the white collar and sleeves, a single patch of sharp red in the seat cushion, and the reddish light falling on the leather of the chair. In 19th-century art and fashion, colour was associated with femininity and emotion; male portraiture tended towards muted shades and monochromatic contrasts. Female portraits, and especially those by Ingres, tend to show the sitter in a relaxed pose, dressed in and surrounded by splendour. By convention, a female portrait was for men to gaze upon: "without moral mystery, it awaits, like a white page, until the sensibility of a man inscribes his dream upon it. It is a permanent spectacle, open, like a landscape to admiration." The sitter in Ingres' Baronne de Rothschild (1848) looks out at the viewer with almost the same directness as Bertin, but the image is softened by the attractiveness of the Baronne's dress and her relaxed pose. Bertin is upright and alert, the subdued colours bringing the viewer to full concentration on his face and character, the "epitome of modern masculinity."
Read more about this topic: Portrait Of Monsieur Bertin
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