Towards the end of 1806 Ingres was at length supplied with the necessary funds to proceed to Rome. Once established in the Villa Medici fortune began to smile on him. He received several important official commissions. His talent also found private appreciators. The General Miollis, a fanatical admirer of Virgil; M. de Norvins, M. Marcotte; ladies like Madame de Lavalette, Madame Forgeot, and Madame Devauçay, gave him orders for portraits and pictures. Joachim Murat, then King of Naples, also took an interest in the young painter who had been born in the same province as himself. He commissioned the “Dormeuse de Naples” and the “Grande Odalisque,” and invited him to his Court to paint portraits of the members of his family.
So flourishing did the young artist’s affairs look that he resolved to face the responsibilities of marriage. He authorised a friend, a M. Loréal, an employé of the French Government in Rome, to find him a wife. M. Loréal’s choice fell upon a Mlle. Magdaleine Chapelle, a young Frenchwoman of about the same age as the artist, who was then acting as cashier in a café at Guéret. M. Boyer d’Agen has recently published a letter from the young fiancée to her sister announcing the approaching marriage. It is dated 30th August 1813. She starts by saying that just as she was beginning to despair of ever finding a suitable husband “they had written to her from Rome saying they had found exactly what she wanted.” “You can judge of the pleasure the news gave me,” she exclaims quite frankly, “and it made me feel ten years younger, so that I now look only twenty years of age.” She promises to send her sister a portrait of her future husband on another occasion, but says that for the present she must be satisfied with a verbal description. “He is a good-looking young man. I always said my husband must be handsome.” “He is a painter--not a house-painter, but a great painter of history, a great talent. He earns from ten to twelve thousand livres a year. You see that with that we shall not die of hunger. He has a good character, and is very gentle. He is neither a drinker, a gambler, nor a rake. He has no faults. He promises to make me very happy, and I love to believe he will.”