This was in 1796, and for the next four years Ingres worked diligently and with such effect that before long he was recognized as one of David's most promising pupils. A proof of his master's appreciation of his ability is the fact that when called upon to paint a portrait of Madame Récamier (see MASTERS IN ART, Part 74, Vol. 7) David selected his young pupil Ingres to assist him in the work. But harmony between master and pupil was of short duration, and although to the end of his life Ingres spoke with admiration of "the great David and his great school," asserting that his teaching was established "on the severest and the truest principles," friction arose between them, so that in the competition for the grand prize of Rome in 1800, Ingres, unjustly it was said, was awarded but the second prize. In the following year David's jealousy was aroused by the praise bestowed by the English sculptor Flaxman upon the composition by Ingres of 'Achilles and the Ambassadors of Agamemnon,' which won for its author the grand prize of Rome. Although the young painter was now entitled to a sojourn of five years in Italy, such was the reduced state of the French national finances that his departure for Rome was indefinitely postponed. In the meantime he was accorded a studio in the deserted convent of the Capuchins in Paris, where with several other artists he pursued his studies. Poor and without commissions, save a few chance orders, or a stray job for some bookseller, Ingres worked assiduously at drawings and studies in color, producing also a number of works which have since become famous--a portrait of his father, one of himself at twenty-four (now at Chantilly), portraits of Monsieur and Madame Rivière (in the Louvre), 'La belle Zélie' (Rouen Museum), two portraits of Napoleon Bonaparte, and others, in which, as Delaborde has said, "he showed, as boldly and forcibly as at the end of his career, all the strong, realistic qualities which form the basis of his art." At length, in 1806, he was enabled to go to Italy, where he remained for eighteen years, during the first five of which he was a pensioner of the French Academy in Rome, then established in the Villa Medici. He now found himself able to study at the fountainhead both ancient and Renaissance art, and was transported by the beauty of the works of the sixteenth-century Italian painters--especially by those of Raphael, whom he always regarded as the greatest of all masters.