While he had been still in Rome, in 1839, Ingres had received from the Duc de Luynes a commission to decorate the great room at the Château of Dampierre with two large mural paintings representing “The Age of Gold” and “The Age of Iron.” He was delighted with the commission, as he was always dreaming of reviving the great traditions of decorative painting. He made numberless studies for these subjects, many of them among the most beautiful of his drawings. But as the painting had to be done actually on the walls at Dampierre, the work progressed very slowly. Years flew by, and the artist’s enthusiasm cooled. The noble Duke and the sensitive and proud painter could not get along well under the same roof. Ingres thought himself slighted on one occasion (in 1850) and brusquely threw up the commission, leaving his work unfinished. There exists of this gigantic work only a sketch at Dampierre, an infinite number of drawings at the Museum of Montauban, and a little painting executed from these drawings in 1862, a very feeble representation of what the definitive work would have been. As for “The Age of Iron,” we have only the preliminary studies. * * * * * As if to revenge himself for the loss of his promised masterpiece, Ingres now took up again a number of the works he had sketched in his youth and set himself to finish them or repaint them. He also busied himself painting replicas of others which had passed out of his hands but with which he was not entirely satisfied. He painted thus a repetition of the “Apotheosis of Homer,” adding a number of fresh figures and substituting others for some of the poets and artists of his first choice. After much anxious reflection and discussion with his pupils, he decided to banish Shakespeare, as he had already banished Goethe, from the group of the immortals. He also painted replicas of his “Sistine Chapel,” of “Roger delivering Angelica,” and variations of his “Œdipus” and “Stratonice.” He also painted four or five slightly different versions of the figure of the Virgin in his early picture of the “Vow of Louis XIII.” One of these developed into a picture of “The Virgin between St. Nicholas and St. Alexander”--a subject the Emperor of Russia had asked him to treat. We find another version of the same type in “The Virgin with the Host,” which forms one of our illustrations. In no other work of Ingres is his passionate admiration of Raphael more clearly displayed.