Jean Charles Auguste Simon dit Simon fils (1776-1843)

After six years at the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture in Toulouse, Ingres arrived in Paris in August 1797 to prepare for the Prix de Rome competition. Parallel to his studies in David's studio, he developed his talents as a self-taught portrait painter, a practice likely to provide him with resources until he could make a living from his painting. His production of small pencil portraits in medallions, a genre to which his father had introduced him from an early age, ceased with the discovery of Jean-Baptiste Isabey's portraits drawn in the black manner, the object of an extraordinary craze during the Directoire period. Their imitation by the young Ingres was the first step in his experimentation with faded black chalk, whose ambition grew as his mastery of technical means increased. The portraits of Pierre Guillaume Cazeaux and Aglaé Adanson (private collections), dating from around 1802-1803 at the latest, demonstrate a particularly subtle use of Isabey's manner in the modulation of shadows, a high degree of refinement in the details of faces, hair and drapery, and are striking for the truth with which the figures are modeled.

At the same time as producing finished drawings of reduced dimensions, Ingres practiced life-size portraiture using the estompe, a piece of skin or paper rolled into a cylinder and finished with a point, to spread powdered black stone in a gesture similar to that of a painter. Five large head studies that have come down to us bear witness to an ambition that is more painting than drawing. On large sheets of paper traditionally used to draw nudes, Ingres modeled his heads with a "fat and soft" line, free of "small details", according to the precepts of David. He applied this approach timidly in the portrait of Pierre Révoil (Bayonne, Musée Bonnat-Helleu), which inaugurates this pre-pictorial series at the end of 1797 or early the following year. The monumentality of the two heads of the Harvey sisters' maid (Paris, Musée du Louvre and Harvard, Fogg Art Museum) is enhanced by the ease with which they are sketched, while the quest for finish is pushed to the highest degree in the copy after Leonardo da Vinci's La Belle Ferronnière (Birmingham, The Barber Institute of Fine Arts). Incorporating all the techniques he had employed since his debut, the portrait of Simon fils from the year XI is the ultimate culmination of a quest for virtuosity that foreshadowed that which he would soon develop solely with the brush.

Hans Naef is credited with identifying the model and his family background. Through his mother, Jean Charles Auguste Simon belonged to a family of artists: his great-aunt was the wife of Jean Valade (1709-1787), painter to the king, while his maternal grandfather, Jean-Michel Chevotet (1698-1772), was architect to the king, as was his uncle Jean-Baptiste Chaussard (1729-1818), who married one of the Chevotet daughters. Pastel portraits of these members by Jean-Baptiste Perronneau and Jean Valade have reached the Musée d'Orléans, along with Granger's portrait of Simon, as well as his two portraits drawn by Ingres in the year XI (1802-1803) and in 1806, thanks to a bequest from his great nephew Hector Delzons in 1895. The circumstances in which the painter and his model met remain obscure. Naef had initially suggested identifying the latter with the paper merchant Simon, who occupied a studio adjacent to Ingres's in the Convent des Capucines in the early years of the century, who framed the 1806 portrait and who appears several times in the artist's 1806-1807 correspondence, but it is no longer possible to confuse the two men since the archives have revealed the latter's first name, Pierre.

Differing readings of the date of the first portrait of Simon fils have introduced confusion into the chronology of Ingres' early works. Based on the received wisdom that the Republican calendar never used Arabic numerals, Hélène Toussaint believed the date should be read asYear II (from September 1793 to September 1794) instead ofYear 11 (from September 1802 to September 1803), thus crediting the artist with exceptional, but unlikely, mastery from the age of thirteen or fourteen. However, a quick statistical study of the newspapers and manuscripts of the time reveals that Arabic numerals were, if not more frequent, at least as common as Roman numerals. In terms of hairstyle and costume, the date proposed by the historian was hardly more plausible, as the long locks framing Simon's face - avatars of the "dog ears" of the Incroyables, to use the capillary vocabulary of the time - derive from a fashion that appeared with the Directoire and lasted until the end of the Consulate.

Interpreting Leonardo's lesson in a different way to that employed in the copy of La Belle Ferronnière, the pencil models the face in small strokes as a miniaturist's brush would, creating velvety shadows on an epidermis made almost palpable by the scale of the image. While the bright light that bathes the face limits the shadows, the effect of the model's presence is no less strong, achieved both by the shadow cast on the wall that brings him forward and by the immediate proximity of the closely framed bust. To achieve this high degree of virtuosity, Ingres did not combine different techniques, but used a wide range of black chalk stones, from the most finely cut, for the face, to powdered and washed pigment, for the costume, with sparingly applied white chalk being the only alternative technique. The very painterly use of chalk was intended to define a visual effect that could be transposed to canvas: that of realism, generated by tactile proximity to the model, combined with idealization, achieved by moderately rounding the head with delicately blended shadows. The success of Simon fils's portrait rendered the practice of large-scale drawing obsolete, and paved the way for the first painted portraits, around 1804.

Reduced to smaller proportions, drawing nonetheless continued to be the object of formal research, now autonomous from painting. The second portrait of Simon fils, executed in 1806 shortly before the painter's departure for Rome, is a crucial milestone in this reorientation. Bust in profile to the right, head almost full-frontal, the sitter stares at the viewer, still gracing him with his almost Jocondian smile. Going against the grain of the pictorial style previously elaborated in black stone, Ingres adopted graphite, a medium with a more metallic mid-gray color, enabling a small-scale execution of great finesse, reproducing in particular the hatch-like modeling of the portrait of the Year XI, but on the scale of a miniature. The image's seductive quality is the result of exploiting the reserve of the paper, which acts as if the work were overexposed, combined with the transparency of the shadows obtained using graphite-antimony lead, whose hyper-reflective properties are only truly revealed with a magnifying glass - the artist, who we imagine to have possessed an ocular magnifying glass since he had practiced miniature portraiture in his youth, could not have been insensitive to the preciousness of this medium, invisible to the naked eye. The formula thus perfected set the prototype for the "pencil portrait", which Ingres was to develop rapidly on his arrival in Rome, by doing away with the square line that still enclosed Simon.