Portrait of Monsieur Bertin

<p>A big, solid man sits leaning forward, both hands planted on his knees, and looks straight out at you with a level, faintly challenging stare. He fills the canvas — you can feel the weight of his body pressing into the chair, the velvet coat pulled taut across his shoulders. Ingres gives him almost no setting at all: a plain warm-brown wall, a glimpse of a mahogany armchair, nothing to distract from the man himself.</p><p>What holds you is the head and the hands. The white hair is a loose, wiry halo around a face that is heavy, alert, a little wary — the kind of face that has sat through a great many meetings and made up its mind about most of them. Look at how the light falls cleanly on the forehead and cheek while the black coat swallows almost everything else; Ingres, trained to prize careful drawing above loose brushwork, has spent his effort on the face and the two hands, which are drawn with the same unforgiving precision as a portrait study, veins and knuckles included.</p><p>The sitter is Louis-Fran&#231;ois Bertin, a newspaper publisher of considerable means and influence in Paris, and the picture reads as a portrait of confidence and command rather than charm. There&#39;s no flattery in it, but there&#39;s no hostility either — just a man used to being looked at and unbothered by it.</p>

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