Le Songe d'Ossian

1813

Married: Madeleine Chapelle

1813

Marriage to Madeleine Chapelle

The acquaintance began by letter: Ingres drew Madeleine Chapelle's portrait from descriptions in her letters, and when they met in September the drawing matched the original; they married in December. Madeleine wrote to her sister that Ingres was an artist of enormous talent, neither a spendthrift, nor a drunkard, nor a libertine.

1814

Death of his father

In 1814 Ingres's father, Jean-Marie-Joseph, died in France. They had last met ten years earlier, in 1804, when his father visited Paris and Ingres painted his portrait.

1814–1815

The loss of a child

After a difficult childbirth the child of Ingres and Madeleine did not survive, and the couple remained childless.

1815

The fall of the Empire strips Ingres of his patrons

After the fall of Napoleon's empire and the Congress of Vienna, the French living in Rome left the city in droves. Ingres, dependent on a narrow circle of patrons, could no longer earn as he used to.

1815–1820

Portrait drawings of tourists to make a living

With the French administration gone, painting commissions were rare, and Ingres supplemented his income with pencil portraits of wealthy tourists, chiefly English. To visitors who asked whether this was where the man who draws the little portraits lived, he answered irritably: “No, the man who lives here is a painter!”