As year after year passed by, and neither reputation nor money rewarded his efforts, the cold indifference and neglect of his country were keenly felt by him. He was, however, so firmly convinced that his methods were the true ones--that for an attainment of the highest style an artist must turn to nature, and that color and effect should be wholly subordinate to beauty of line--that, even when sore pressed and in the utmost need, he never deviated from his path in order to cater to popular prejudice and prevailing taste. "I count on my old age to avenge me," he used to say.
In 1813, when he was thirty-three, Ingres married a young French woman, Madeleine Chapelle by name, who, in a rather business-like way, had gone to Rome from her home in Montauban at the invitation of some relatives living in Italy with whom Ingres had become well acquainted, for the express purpose of becoming the artist's wife. The marriage was a congenial and perfectly happy one. Madame Ingres seems from the first to have felt firm faith in her husband's genius, and he owed much to her unfailing courage and devotion. The burden of his poverty was cheerfully assumed by her; all petty annoyances, as well as serious anxieties, were kept from his knowledge so far as was possible, and with no thought but of his well-being and his peace of mind, his wife shared his trials and lightened his cares.
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."
