Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres

The man in it was a rich young aristocrat with a habit of ordering paintings of himself — this was one of several he commissioned from the same painter, going by the museum's own notes. His father, I gather, had been a heavyweight in French law and politics, so the family was well used to being looked at.

Supposedly the commission was turned down flat at first, and only accepted after an actual meeting with her — then it dragged on for something like a decade, with a whole second painting of her finished years after this one. Nobody, it seems, was in any hurry.

This was made to order as a ceiling for one of the Louvre's own rooms — a museum commissioning itself a giant tribute to the classics, more or less. The crowd is supposedly a roll-call of great names from across the centuries, all painted turning up to worship one man.

He ran the post in Rome during the years the French were running the city, from what I can find — one of a long line of officials and expats who paid to sit for portraits like this. Turning those out was apparently the reliable work, funding the grander stuff nobody wanted to buy yet.

There's more than one of these — supposedly a first version came a few years earlier, and the garden behind was added here by an assistant rather than the man whose name is on it. He'd never been anywhere near the world he's painting; it's said the whole scene comes out of travel books and other people's prints, which was normal for this kind of picture.