Don Pedro Of Toledo Kissing The Sword Of Henri IV

Medium: Oil On Wood Panel
Size: 48.5 x 40.5cm (19.1 x 15.9 in)

Provenance: Painted for the 1814 Salon, then revised and completed for M. Graves, Montauban; [Deymié, Montauban; de Prat de Lestang;] anonymous sale April 27th 1897, lot 39 (bt. in); Oslo, Halfdan Mustad,; New York, Private Collection.

Exhibited: Paris, Salon, 1814, no. 533; Paris, Exposition Universelle, 1855 (no. 3357); Paris, École des Beaux -arts. Tableaux, études peintes, dessins et croquis de J.A.D. Ingres, 1867 (no 67); London, Tate Gallery, The Romantic Movement, 1959 (no. 220); Paris, Petit Palais, Ingres, 1967-68 (no. 119) (repr.); New Orleans Museum of Art, New York Stair Sainty Matthiesen Inc, Cincinnati Taft Museum, 1996-97, Romance and Chivalry, History and Literature Reflected in Early Nineteenth Century French Painting, catalogue no. 37, pp. 15, 86-87, 88-90, 170, 210, 211-212, illus: chapter title page 15, figs: 59, 128, & 153;

Of the known versions of Don Pedro of Toledo Kissing the Sword of Henri IV the present picture is the most striking, due primarily to the dramatic perspective of the Salle des Caryatides and to numerous minor alterations on which Ingres labored long and hard. Although this painting was signed and dated Rome 1820 Ingres had originally entered it in the 1814 Salon, but then reworked it, finally completing the painting in 1822. When the picture was finally completed Ingres wrote detailed instructions on its presentation to his client and specified black wood for the frame, which he felt was appropriate to the taste of the time of Henri IV. Ingres used Jean Goujon’s famous caryatid tribune in the Louvre to situate his scene in the royal palace. A meticulous documentarian as well as a cultivated artist, Ingres modeled his Renaissance page after a figure in Bernard de Montfaucon’s Monumens de la monarchie française (1729-1733). His decor was probably inspired by Antoine Borel’s illustrations for André Chenier’s Charles IX, published during the Revolution, for Borel set this episode in the same large room in the Louvre of the Valois as did Ingres, thus giving contemporary viewers their first taste of complicity with this famous architectural site.

Don Pedro of Toledo Kissing the Sword of Henri IV is far from a typical courtly subject in that neither of the major personages (the King of Spain and Henri IV) appear in the scene. Ingres cited Hardouin de Beaumont de Péréfixe’s Histoire du roi Henri Grand (1661) as his source for this subject. Don Pedro of Toledo, the Ambassador of France's long standing enemy King Philip II of Spain, encountered a page carrying the sword of Henri IV in the Louvre Palace. He dropped to his knees and kissed the sword saying: “I render honor to the most glorious sword in Christendom.” This gesture, which was criticized by a Salon reviewer as having the air of relic worship, was defended by Ingres: “I ask of all who reason and who have sound judgment, whether the sword of Henri IV is not effectively a relic here and whether the act of the Ambassador is not a form of adoration?”