The Princesse de Broglie

The Princesse de Broglie.
The Princesse de Broglie is an oil-on-canvas painting by the French Neoclassical artist Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. Completed between 1851 and 1853, it shows Pauline de Broglie, who adopted the courtesy title princesse, and married Albert de Broglie, the 28th prime minister of France. She was aged 28 at the time of its completion. Although highly intelligent and widely known for her beauty, Pauline suffered from profound shyness, and the painting captures her melancholia. She contracted tuberculosis and died in 1860 aged 35. The painting is considered one of the artist's finest later-period female portraits, along with those of Comtesse d'Haussonville, of Baronne de Rothschild and of Madame Moitessier. As with many of Ingres's female portraits, details of costume and setting are rendered with a chilly precision while her body seems to lack a solid bone structure. The portrait is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.