Like that other virtuoso of the rich and famous and their clothes, John Singer Sargent, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres hated painting portraits. It’s difficult, of course, to imagine two painters more different: the prodigiously facile, seductive Sargent, who could suggest the gleam of satin and pearls with slapdash, wristy flicks of the brush, and the severe, reserved Ingres, no less adept at conjuring up the trappings of luxury, but whose tense, evocative line and polished surfaces seem to materialize without any evidence of the hand. Yet these two acclaimed painters seem to have had a similar clientele (allowing for the differences between their eras) and to have shared a similar dislike of the portrait genre. “Cursed portraits!” Ingres famously declared. “They always keep me from undertaking important things.”

By important things, he meant the impressive public decorations, narrative paintings, and altarpieces that by the ...

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