File:Presumed portrait of Louis-Pierre Haudebourt by Ingres.jpg

English: Presumed portrait of the architect Louis-Pierre Haudebourt by Ingres

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The identification of the sitter as the architect Haudebourt is complicated by Ingres' notoriously bad spelling. He was apparently completely unreliable in his orthography, consistently misspelling the name of his lifelong friend, Edouard Gatteaux and his idol Beethoven, among others (see Literature below, H. Naef, vol. 1, p. 438). The drawing is inscribed to hautbourt, but the description of the sitter as an architect has long suggested that it is in fact Louis-Pierre Haudebourt, friend of Ingres and husband of Hortense Lescot, the female painter of genre scenes. The first documentation of the drawing as a portrait of Haudebourt in an inscription on a photograph of the work from the collection of Alfred Armand, himself an architect. (For a more complete discussion of the identification of the sitter see Literature below, H. Naef, pp. 438-39). Although datable to 1814-18, roughly contemporary with the Portrait of Cherry (lot 92), this is a very differently conceived work than that of the somewhat retiring Englishman. Here there is no question of the sitter's self-confidence, not to say bravado, as he stares boldly out at the viewer. His clothing is casual, befitting that of an art student, and he hooks his thumbs through his suspenders in a bold gesture perhaps unique in the work of Ingres. The handling is looser, the hair quickly indicated and the billowing sleeves barely sketched in. In conception and execution the Portrait of Haudebourt reveals the beginnings of Romanticism in Ingres' oeuvre.