Focus on this artwork and analyze the Two portraits.
He began work on the seated version, depicting the subject in a floral dress. Work on the commission proceeded slowly.  The painting was originally to include the Moitessiers' daughter, Catherine; Ingres, finding little Catherine "impossible", eliminated her from the composition sometime around 1847. Work on the painting was suspended in 1849, when the death in June of Ingres' wife left him unable to work for several months, and Madame Moitessier was distracted by her second pregnancy and the death of her father. In June 1851, having been reminded by the woman he called "la belle et bonne" ("the beautiful and good") that her portrait had still not been completed, Ingres began afresh, painting the standing portrait of her in a dark dress, which he finished in December 1851. He then returned to the seated portrait, which he completed in 1856, twelve years after he started it.Characteristically, Ingres found inspiration in the art of the past when painting Madame Moitessier. The pose with a hand touching the cheek was taken from a fresco of Hercules and Telephus from Herculaneum that he may have seen in Naples in 1814, and which was familiar to him through engravings.  According to the National Gallery, Titian's La Schiavona, also in the gallery, may have inspired the second profile view in the mirror.  She is wearing a dress of fashionable and expensive Lyon silk printed with a floral pattern, which is echoed by the flowers and leaves of the gilt frame. A similar frame was used for Ingres's 1853 portrait  of The Princesse de Broglie.			
			
		
		
			
			
		
		
			
			
		
Numerous drawn studies for both portraits exist. A study on canvas for the seated portrait, in which the figure has been drawn by Ingres and the background painted by an assistant, is in the Musée Ingres in Montauban.
Montauban Lyon silk Titian Musée Ingres Herculaneum engraving La Schiavona National Gallery The Princesse de Broglie Hercules Telephus