Luigi Cherubini

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres had a passion for music and was a competent violinist. He painted this portrait of the illustrious Florentine composer Maria Luigi Cherubini in Rome in the winter of 1840/41. It is based on an earlier portrait sketch that Ingres began in 1834 in Paris, where the composer had lived since 1788. The artist transformed the first version into an ambitious allegorical painting, now in the Louvre, which he completed in 1842.

The Art Museum’s painting was destined for Cherubini himself. Ingres scrutinized the aging flesh and white hair of the composer, then eighty-one years old. He portrayed Cherubini seated pensively in his study, about to compose music, rather than in a neo-Pompeian setting with the Muse standing behind him, as in the Louvre version. Sitting on the table at the left are bound scores of Cherubini’s most famous operas—"Medée," "Ali Baba," and "Les Deux Journées." At the upper right, Ingres indicates Cherubini’s position as director of the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique, through which he enjoyed commissions from the Crown and the Church. Cherubini was so pleased with the painting that he composed a cantata in Ingres’s honor.

Henri Matisse, who arranged this painting’s sale in America in the early twentieth century, favored it over the Louvre’s version, where the sitter is joined by the muse of lyric poetry. He commented that “[the CAM’s painting] is beautiful and in excellent condition.”