Focus on Portrait of Baronne de Rothschild and explain the abstract.
Baronne de Rothschild is an 1848 portrait by the French Neoclassical artist Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. The sitter, Betty de Rothschild (1805–1886) had married her paternal uncle banker James Mayer de Rothschild and was one of the wealthiest women in Europe, and one of the foremost Parisian patrons of the arts. Her beauty and elegance were widely known and celebrated, and inspired Heinrich Heine's poem The Angel. For her portrait, which is painted in oil on canvas, Ingres sought to infuse symbols of her material wealth with the dignity, grace and beauty of Renaissance art, especially that of Raphael, while at the same time adhering to the command of line as practiced by Jan van Eyck. It is this combination which, according to art historians, places Ingres so far apart from his early modernist contemporaries.
Betty de Rothschild's portrait is regarded as one of Ingres' most accomplished works, and has been described as "perhaps the most sumptuous yet approachable image of mid-nineteenth-century opulence."
Rothschild Betty de Rothschild Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres Raphael Neoclassical modernist Jan van Eyck Heinrich Heine James Mayer de Rothschild