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Why did Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres make portrait drawings of foreign tourists in Italy?
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Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres
Self-portrait, oil on canvas by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, c. 1800; in the Condé Museum, Chantilly, France.
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres began creating small-scale portrait drawings of English and other foreign tourists in Italy following the fall of the Napoleonic empire in 1815. With the subsequent French evacuation of Rome, the artist found himself in a precarious financial position and became desperate for work. Consequently, he turned to these portrait commissions as a means of generating income, though he personally viewed them as mere "potboilers" and preferred to focus on his ambitions as a history painter.1