Husband-and-Wife Companion Portraits Join the Getty Collection

The Getty Museum has just installed two newly acquired portraits—a husband-and-wife pair—by French painter Jean-Hippolyte Flandrin (1809–1864).

Flandrin is not a household name today, but in the mid-1800s his reputation was formidable. He was generally regarded as the most talented pupil of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780–1867), and he played a pivotal role in the revival of monumental religious painting through a series of major church commissions in Paris and the provinces. He simultaneously became a successful portraitist through the striking likenesses he exhibited regularly in the Paris Salon, starting in 1840 and culminating in 1863, when he presented a memorable depiction of Emperor Napoleon III. Flandrin brought a unique blend of elegance, distinction, and sobriety to his portraits, whose stylistic affinity with the work of Ingres is evident in their pure lines, subtle modeling, rich coloration, exquisite detailing, and highly polished execution.

Ingres was the primary point of connection between Flandrin and Marie and Alexandre Legentil, the subjects of the Getty portraits. Marie (1828–1920) was the daughter of a longstanding patron of Ingres, Charles Marcotte, known as Marcotte d’Argenteuil (1773–1864), whose 1810 portrait by Ingres can be seen in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. Ingres subsequently drew Marie’s portrait on at least two occasions, first in 1830, when she was just 16 months old, and then in 1846, when she was engaged to be married to Alexandre Legentil (1821–1889), scion of a family in the department store business, whom Ingres also portrayed on the occasion (see both portraits by Ingres below).

The Getty paintings present the couple a little over a decade later. The Legentils’ choice of Flandrin to depict them must have been an obvious one, given his close relationship with Ingres, his well-established reputation as a portraitist, and, more personally, the strong religious convictions he shared with them. Alexandre and Marie may have known the artist quite well, since he had executed mural paintings for Saint-Vincent de Paul, their parish church in Paris, in whose affiliated charity, the Société de Saint-Vincent-de-Paul, the couple was also highly active. Indeed, both Legentils would devote much of their lives to religious and philanthropic causes; in his later years, for instance, Alexandre was the driving force behind the construction of the Basilica of Sacré-Cœur in Montmartre, while Marie dedicated herself to education initiatives, particularly the vocational training of disadvantaged young women.

Flandrin executed the portrait of Marie (above) first and exhibited it to acclaim in the 1857 Paris Salon. Her hands delicately clasped in her lap, the 28-year-old is seated on a yellow silk upholstered armchair, draped with a fur, before a deep-blue damask wall covering. She is wearing evening attire, her voluminous black silk dress completed by a lace-trimmed bodice baring her upper chest, shoulders, and forearms. Her fashionable ensemble is tastefully accented by silk ribbons, a jeweled brooch, cameo and pearl bracelets, and a triple-strand pearl necklace. In keeping with reigning fashion, her dark hair is parted in the center, brushed tightly down and arranged heavily on the sides of her head, covering her ears. A gauzy veil, pinned to the back of her hair, provides an indicator of her marital status.

A year later, in 1858, Flandrin painted the portrait of Alexandre (above). With a prominent forehead and full beard, the 37-year-old calmly regards the viewer, his right hand raised thoughtfully toward his chin. His unremarkable masculine dress—a long black jacket over loose grey trousers—is offset by rich surrounds: a plush red velvet armchair, its complementary green backdrop, and a side table draped with a patterned textile and topped with some papers and a precious, Boulle-inspired inkstand boasting gilt-bronze mounts, a tortoiseshell veneer, and brass inlays.

Although the portrait of Alexandre was not shown in the Salon, it was displayed with the portrait of his wife in the posthumous retrospective of Flandrin’s work at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1865. After that exhibition, the two works remained in the family’s collection and were not seen again in public until 2024, when they came up for auction in Paris. London dealer Daniel Katz bought them, had them carefully cleaned—on account of old, discolored varnish—and proceeded to sell them to Getty. The paintings are in excellent condition, their support canvases are unlined, and they retain both their original stretchers and frames.

The portraits are presented here with new photography, and I encourage visitors to see the paintings in person in the West Pavilion (gallery W202) of the Getty Center—especially since it’s rare to encounter Flandrin’s works in museums outside his native Lyon. Indeed, the portraits of Alexandre and Marie Legentil join only two other Flandrin portraits in US museum collections: Madame Louis Antoine de Cambourg in the Detroit Institute of Arts and René-Charles Dassy and His Brother Jean-Baptiste-Claude-Amédé Dassy in the Cleveland Museum of Art.

Flandrin’s portraits of the Legentils are, in a lot of ways, a curator’s dream. Representing the artist at his best, they allow us to raise the profile of a historically significant but greatly undervalued artist. At the same time, they help us fill out the story of French art that we present at Getty, providing a crucial link between early 19th-century portraits by Jacques-Louis David (the teacher of Ingres) and later 19th-century works by Edgar Degas (who studied with Flandrin’s pupil Louis Lamothe). More immediately, Flandrin’s paintings dramatically transform their designated gallery, becoming powerful new anchor pieces on individual walls that not only seem perfectly proportioned for them but also put them into direct confrontation with a considerably more risqué and flamboyant portrait on the opposite wall: the Portrait of Leonilla, Princess of Sayn-Wittgenstein-Sayn, by Franz Xaver Winterhalter, one of Flandrin’s main rivals. It’s a contrast between a noblewoman not afraid of pushing boundaries versus the ultimate in bourgeois respectability.