Almost immediately after his marriage Ingres’ luck changed. Murat was overthrown in 1814. His successor refused all the pictures that had been commissioned from Ingres, and those which had been finished were sold although the artist had not been paid for them. In a letter to his friend Gelibert, dated 7th July 1818, Ingres complains that he has been able to put nothing aside, that he has to live, as it were, from day to day. He admits he has several orders on hand for pictures, but “as I paint only to paint well, I take a long time over them, and consequently earn little.” His chief resource was the making of chalk or pencil portraits, for which his usual price was twenty-five francs. But after each portrait, as his wife told a friend in after years, Ingres declared that he would not do any more, that he was a painter of history, not a draughtsman of the faces of the middle classes. “Nevertheless,” she added, “it was necessary to live, and M. Ingres took up his pencil again.” But as even this slender resource began to fail him at Rome, he resolved to leave that city and take up his residence at Florence, where his friend Bartolini, the sculptor, was already settled. [Illustration: PLATE IV.--L’APOTHEOSE D’HOMERE (In the Louvre) This large and famous picture was commissioned to fill the ceiling of one of the galleries of the Louvre. It is signed “Ingres pingbat, anno 1827.” It cost the master more research and trouble than any of his other works. This is proved by the number of painted studies, some of them superior to the finished picture itself, and the repeated references to it in his letters and note-books. Homer is being crowned by Victory, and the two beautiful female figures seated at his feet represent the _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_. Around Homer are the painters, sculptors, and musicians whom the artist wished to glorify. “To his great regret,” he said he felt compelled to exclude Goethe, because he found too many “faults” in his writings. But Shakespeare and Pope were admitted. In his last version of this subject, made in 1865, Shakespeare was also finally expelled.]