Portrait of Louis Francois Bertin

The newspaper magnate Louis-Francois Bertin sits leaning forward, both hands gripping his knees, his bulk and his shrewd, commanding gaze filling the frame with the sheer confidence of the rising bourgeoisie. Ingres renders every detail of flesh, hair, and rumpled coat with cool precision, yet the picture lives through its sitter's formidable presence. Now in the Louvre, it became the definitive portrait of the new commercial class that ruled nineteenth-century France - a self-made man of the press, alert and unyielding, said to embody the very spirit of the bourgeois age.