Mademoiselle Caroline Rivière
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780-1867) · 1805
A girl of about fourteen stands against a wide river landscape under a pale sky, wearing a white Empire dress, long ochre gloves and a white swansdown boa wrapped around her arms. Her face is turned straight toward you with an expression that is serious and slightly withdrawn, her dark hair parted simply and pulled back. The horizon is set low so that she rises above the meadows, the water and a distant village with a church spire, like a figure on a pedestal. The paint is smooth and enamelled, and the outline of her figure against the sky is as clean as a silhouette.
Ingres painted Caroline in 1805, together with portraits of her parents, Philibert Rivière, an official of the imperial court, and Madame Rivière; all three are in the Louvre. He was twenty-five, and the three pictures were shown at the Salon of 1806, where critics found them strange and stiff, Gothic even, with their flattened forms and hard contours. Look at the boa, which softens the tension of the pose, at the slightly elongated neck and at the perfectly oval face. The painted surface was originally arched at the top, and the signature at the lower right may not be by Ingres himself. In 1938 the paint layer was transferred to a new canvas.
Caroline Rivière died in 1807, a year after the Salon. The three family portraits stayed with the Rivières and came to the Louvre in 1870 by bequest. The picture is now treasured for exactly the qualities that troubled the Salon: the purity of line, the simplicity of the palette and the direct, unsentimental gaze of a young sitter. Together with her parents, it shows Ingres, before he left for Rome, already a master portraitist.
Did You Know? The sitter died in 1807, a year after the portrait was shown at the Salon, when she was about fourteen.
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