Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres was born in Montauban in 1780, the son of an artist who nurtured his son’s artistic talents. After studying at the academy in Toulouse, he moved to Paris where he entered the studio of Jacques-Louis David in 1797. In 1801, he won the prestigious Prix de Rome. Due to a lack of funds, it was not until 1806 when Ingres took up residency at the Académie de France in Rome. In 1809, sculptor and medalist Édouard Gatteaux also arrived at the Villa Medici in 1809, beginning a lifelong friendship.

In 1813 Ingres married Madeleine Chapelle (1782-1849). Portraiture featured prominently in these early years of Ingres’s career, fostering his talent as a draftsman and providing him with income. After relocating to Florence in 1820, his fortunes changed when his work received great acclaim at the Salon of 1824, prompting a return to Paris after eighteen years of absence. Elected to the Académie des Beaux-Arts, he established a studio that became one of the centers of French Neoclassicism. In 1833, Ingres was appointed president of the École des Beaux-Arts, and the following year he returned to Italy as director of the French Academy in Rome.

During the 1820s and early 1830s Ingres was a frequent visitor to the Gatteaux family’s country estate in Neauphle-le-Vieux, near Versailles. There he produced drawings of Édouard Gatteaux and his parents, medal engraver Nicolas-Marie Gatteaux (1751-1832) and his wife Louise-Rosalie, née Anfrye (1761-1847). After the death of his beloved Madeleine in 1849, the grief-stricken Ingres stayed with his close confidant and collector, during which time he conceived the remarkable Gatteaux group portrait.

In this highly unusual and conceptual sophisticated composition, Édouard is reunited with his deceased parents through three engravings by Claude-Marie-François Dien (1787-1865), executed after earlier drawings by Ingres: Édouard in 1834, his mother in 1825, and his father in 1828.[1] The trimmed impressions, printed on very thin paper, are collaged onto a larger sheet, reducing Édouard’s portrait to a bust-length image. Ingres then drew extensively over and around the printed images, carefully disguising the edges of the sheets, while adding Édouard’s lower body and two female figures within an impressively integrated interior set at Neauphle.[2]

Édouard, portrayed as a dapper young man, was sixty-two years old at the time, while his mother was already dead for three years and his father for eighteen. The standing young woman is Édouard’s niece Paméla, while the letter reading lady in the adjoining room is Eugénie Anfrye: the only contemporaneous sitters depicted at their actual age in 1850, when the composition was created.[3]

Paméla de Gardanne (1824-1862) might just as well have been called Paméla Gatteaux. The only child of Charles de Gardanne and Virginie Gatteaux, Édouard’s sister, she was orphaned early, losing her mother at birth and her father at the age of three. She was raised by her maternal grandmother, Louis-Rosalie Gatteaux, née Anfrye, and grew up in the Gatteaux household. Her uncle Édouard, who never married so that he could remain devoted to his mother, loved Paméla as if she were his own daughter. When Ingres made the present drawing in 1850, Paméla had been married to Edouard Brame for four years.

While the grandparents are represented posthumously, Paméla, aged twenty-six, and her cousin Eugénie Anfrye, twelve years her senior and seemingly soulmates through surviving correspondence, represent is the living generation.[4] Paméla’s short life unfolded largely within the aristocratic circles of Paris and at the family country estate. In 1860, at Neauphle, she gave birth to a fourth child who died almost immediately after birth. Paméla never recovered from losing a second child. Much beloved by her children Paul and Caroline, she died in 1862 of pleurisy at the age of thirty-eight. She was outlived by her uncle Édouard Gatteaux, who died in 1881 at the age of ninety-three at the Hôtel Brame on 71, Rue Saint-Dominique in Paris.

Shortly before her death, both Paméla and Édouard Gatteaux were painted by Ingres’s favorite pupil, Hippolyte Flandrin, married to Édouard’s cousin. Paméla’s impatient husband declined to pose for a portrait. The two paintings met very different fates: Édouard’s portrait was destroyed in 1871 during the Paris Commune, when a fire destroyed his magnificent mansion at 41 rue de Lille together with his art collection with over one-hundred Ingres drawings destined for the Louvre.[5]

Paméla’s portrait survived. Perhaps intended to adorn the Hôtel Brame, it was recorded at Neauphle in the nineteenth century and remained there until the early 1930s, when the estate was inherited by her grandson Henri Brame. Brame, detached from reality under the influence of fervent religious mysticism combined with royalist convictions, fell into financial ruin. Forced to sell the Gatteaux estate to Swiss friends, the Appenzeller family, who allowed him to remain there free of charge until the German occupation in 1940, receiving Flandrin’s painting as compensation. Brame, who died in 1954, spent his final years in modest circumstances. After the war, the Appenzellers sold the estate in 1945 but retained Paméla’s portrait. Madame Appenzeller, now a widow, eventually donated it to the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon titled Mademoiselle de Gardanne, obscuring Paméla’s identity.

[1] The original portrait drawings, part of the large collection of more than 120 drawings by Ingres, were destroyed in 1871 when the residence of Édouard Gatteaux burned during the Paris Commune. Prior to their destruction, the collection had been photographed by Charles Marville (1813–1879 and reproduced in an album published in 1873. The present drawing survived the fire, suggesting that it remained at Neauphle, rather than the Paris house.

[2] Preparatory studies on tracing paper for this tour de force are preserved in the collection of the Musée Ingres Bourdelle in Montauban. See Georges Vigne, Dessins d’Ingres: Catalogue raisonné des dessins du musée de Montauban, Paris, 1995, ill. nos. 2654-2656

[3] According to Naef (op.cit., Vol. V, p. 171) the standing figure is Louise-Jeanne-Hyacinthe Dastros (1782-1858), wife of Édouard’s cousin, Eugène Anfrye. This identification has been disputed by Foucart-Borville (op.cit., p. 65), who instead proposes that the sitter is Eugénie Anfrye (1811-1885), married to Henri Fournier (1800-1888) in 1833. Naef, who’s lifelong research on Ingres’s drawings included extensive study of the Gatteaux family archives, established that Édouard’s mother was Louise-Rosalie Anfrye. Her brother, Jean-Jacques-Joseph Anfrye, a coin inspector at the Hôtel des Monnaies in Paris, married Jeanne-Louise-Hyacinthe Dastros (1782-1858). The couple had two children: Eugène and Eugénie. Madame Anfrye-Dastros died in 1858 at the residence of her nephew Édouard Gatteaux on the rue de Lille in Paris. She was buried in the Gatteaux family tomb at Père Lachaise Cemetery, not far from the grave of Ingres.

[4] See Foucart-Borville, op.cit., p. 61

[5] A copy after the original painting by Flandrin, gifted by Édouard Gatteaux’s nephew to the Louvre in 1889, is depostied at the Palace of Versailles, accession no. MV5898.Engraved
Achille Réveil, published in: Albert Magimel’s Oeuvres de J.A. Ingres, 1851