Explore the Preparatory studies of this artwork.
There are comparatively few extant preparatory sketches for the de Broglie painting compared to other of his later period portraits. Ingres's usual technique was to use sketches both to plot the final work and to provide guidance for assistants on whom he relied to paint in the less important passages. Some others have been lost or destroyed.The extant sketches date from 1850 to 1853 and are drawn with graphite on paper or tracing paper. They vary in elaboration and detail, but show Ingres thinking through the eventual form and pose of the sitter. The earliest consists of a brief sketch of the princess in a seated pose. There is a full-length study of a nude standing in essentially the final pose, in which Ingres experimented with two different positions of the crossed arms. A second full-length study shows a clothed figure. Two others are focused on her hands. A highly finished drawing of the princess standing with her left hand at the neck and dressed in a simpler costume than in the painting, may be a study for the painting or an independent work. Besides these five or six extant sketches, about the same number are known to be lost.			
			
		
		
			
			
		
		
			
			
		
		
			
			
		
The painting's central motifs were already established in the earliest studies, in which her oval face, arched eyebrows, and habit of folding her arms with one stuffed into the opposing sleeve appear. Ingres found the sittings difficult and agonised over every detail. He wrote to his friend and patron Charles Marcotte that he was "killing [his] eyes on the background of the Princesse de Broglie, which I am painting at her house, and that helps me advance a great deal; but, alas, how these portraits make me suffer, and this will surely be the last one, excepting, however, the portrait of [his second wife] Delphine."
de Broglie graphite Delphine Charles Marcotte fr left