Hippolyte-François Devillers

This portrait of Hippolyte-François Devillers from 1811 at the Büihrle Collection represents the French expatriate community in Rome that provided Ingres with portrait commissions during the years when his history paintings found no official buyers. Devillers was one of the French administrative and professional community that the Napoleonic annexation of Rome brought to the city, and his portrait testifies to the bourgeois French society that sustained Ingres during his long Roman years. These early portraits established his reputation for combining classical refinement with individual character, and they are now recognized as among the finest portraits produced by any European painter in the early nineteenth century. Ingres's oil surfaces, built through meticulous underdrawing in graphite followed by smooth controlled layers, created a Neoclassical purity that was simultaneously an aesthetic achievement and a philosophical position — the assertion of drawing over color, of classical tradition over Romantic innovation. The Büihrle Collection holds this as an example of Ingres's Roman portrait practice.

The portrait presents the sitter with Ingres's characteristic precision and polished surface. The careful modeling of the face and exact rendering of costume details demonstrate his extraordinary draftsmanship.