Portrait of Jean-Louis Robin
Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres (French, 1780–1867)
c. 1810
- Medium
- Graphite, with stumping, on ivory wove paper
- Classification
- Drawing and Watercolor
- Dimensions
- 28.4 × 22.3 cm (11 3/16 × 8 13/16 in.)
- Culture
- France
- Museum
- Art Institute of Chicago, Prints and Drawings
- Credit line
- Gift of Emily Crane Chadbourne
- Rights
- Public domain (CC0), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Tweens profiles and older: its subjects are known and suit older children. How works are placed
View at the Art Institute of Chicago
About this work
Ingres famously said that “Drawing is everything; it is all of art,” and that “Smoke itself should be expressed by a line.” His celebrated portrait drawings exemplify his devotion to pure line. Ingres drew his portrait of Jean-Louis Robin, chief physician of the French Hospital in Rome, from the Villa Medici, the site of the French Academy in Rome, where the artist was in residence at the time. In the distance, drawn with technical precision, is Saint Peter’s Basilica. Using only graphite, with an astonishing economy of means and in the absence of color and modeling, Ingres rendered a personality and a setting as fully realized as in any painted portrait.
Description © Art Institute of Chicago, CC BY 4.0
