It was at this period that Ingres, in order to earn money enough for their daily bread, executed for slight remuneration many of those marvelous little portraits in lead-pencil (see plates III, IV, and V) which are so exquisite in touch, so perfect in their purity of line, that they place him on a level with the most consummate draftsmen of all times. He himself seems to have regarded these little masterpieces, for they are nothing less, merely as "pot-boilers," and to have even experienced a certain sense of humiliation that his art should perforce be turned into a channel so trivial in his eyes compared with the great works his brush longed to paint. The story is told of a gentleman who one day knocked at the door of his modest studio in Rome, and when Ingres himself appeared, asked timidly, "Does the artist live here who draws portraits in lead-pencil?" "No, sir," was the angry reply; "he who lives here is a painter," and the door was slammed in the face of the astonished visitor. Yet that he did appreciate their artistic excellence is clear from the fact that when in 1855 it was proposed to hang a row of these drawings below the paintings in his exhibition of that year, he objected. "No," he said, "people would look only at them." In 1820, after painting for one of the churches in Rome a large picture representing 'Christ giving the Keys to St. Peter' (now in the Louvre), Ingres left Rome, and, in the hope of better fortune than had so far attended him in Italy, settled in Florence. His friend and former fellow-pupil in David's studio, the sculptor Bartolini, was then living there, and did all in his power to assist him; but Bartolini's kindness served to only alleviate, not to overcome, the hardships of this residence in a city where Ingres was all but unknown, and where he was without even the scanty means of support afforded by the sale of his pencil portraits, which in Rome had been in demand by the strangers constantly passing through that city. He and his wife were indeed so poor that often they had not money enough to buy the necessary food. And yet at the time of their greatest distress he bravely rejected the proposition of a wealthy Englishman to go to England, where a fortune would be assured him by the execution of portraits in lead-pencil.