Amédée-David, the Comte de Pastoret

Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres painted this portrait of the jurist and statesman Amédée-David, comte de Pastoret, between 1823 and 1826, at the height of his powers in Paris, where he had returned from Rome as the acknowledged heir of David. The sitter, a councillor of state and member of the Académie française, is shown half-length against a plain background, his sober black coat and the barely suggested chair concentrating attention on the calm, penetrating face that the artist rendered with the linear precision of his mature style. The picture is the pendant to the portrait of the count’s wife, painted by the elder David in 1791 and also in the Art Institute of Chicago, uniting two generations of French portraiture in one family’s history. The painting is held in the Art Institute of Chicago.