To this period of Ingres’ first sojourn in Rome (from the end of 1806 to 1820) belong some of the artist’s finest and most personal works. We must give the first place to his portraits. The delicious portrait of Madame Aymon, known as “La Belle Zélie” (now in the Museum of Rouen), was immediately followed by what is on all hands regarded as his most beautiful work of this kind. This is the “Madame Devauçay,” of the Museum of Chantilly. It is an admirable example of Ingres’ wonderful power of concentration and absorption in the thing seen. Disdaining the help of accessories, he draws all his inspiration from the face and figure of his model. He seizes the personality of his sitter with so much completeness and such perfect sympathy and understanding, and places it on the canvas with so much authority and power, that the portrait of the individual takes on all the scope of a permanent and absolute type. The portrait of “Madame de Sénonnes” (now in the Museum of Nantes), which was painted about 1810, has the same intensity of spirit as the “Madame Devauçay,” and the same exquisite perfection of modelling and design. It is also marked by greater ease and freedom of handling, a sign of the young master’s growing confidence in his own genius. It is generally regarded as Ingres’ masterpiece of feminine portraiture. The well-known “Œdipus and the Sphinx” was painted in 1808, while the artist was still a pensioner of the School of Rome. It is hard for us to understand the horror and dislike which this picture provoked among the leading spirits of the school of David. What seems to us a typical example of classic art struck the official representatives of Classicism as the work of a revolutionary. In his report on this picture, M. Lethière, the director of the School of Rome, regrets that M. Ingres, in spite of his talent, has failed to grasp the secret of the “grand and noble style of the great masters of the Roman school.” To appreciate the originality and daring of this work, we must compare the figure of Œdipus with that of the Roman heroes in David’s “Rape of the Sabines.” David’s figures are all cast in the same mould. All the particularities of the individual model are ruthlessly eliminated. When we turn from the vague and empty generalisations of David, Regnault, Gérard and Girodet, and look at the narrow forehead, the pugnacious upper lip, the prominent cheek-bones, the deep-sunk eye and the bushy eyebrows of Ingres’ figure, we may begin to understand that the gulf which yawns between the two kinds of Idealism--the abstract idealism of the Davidian school and the concrete idealism of Ingres--is quite as wide and impassable as that which separates them both from Romanticism and Naturalism. [Illustration: PLATE V.--M. BERTIN (In the Louvre) This portrait represents the famous “Bertin ainé, the director of the _Journal des Débats_.” It is signed “J. Ingres, pinxit 1832,” and was exhibited at the Salon of 1833.]