When Ingres completed this portrait of Louise de Broglie, Comtesse d'Haussonville, which was commissioned by the sitter's husband, the Viscount Othenin d'Haussonville, her official title was Viscomtesse. 

In the esoteric language of peerage, that means she upgraded a step when she became a Comtesse. At the time, Ingres was simultaneously working on a portrait of the Madame de Rothschild, and that was not a commission to mess up on, so it took him a few years to finish this one. Not that the Viscomtesse was playing second fiddle to the Madame de Rothschild or anything. The Viscount was a diplomat, so Ingres had to be diplomatic with this commission.

Like Samuel Morse across the pond, Ingres was annoyed by the fact that the cash cow was society portraiture, or "face painting," as Morse called it. Everybody wanted beautiful images of themselves like this one, but Ingres wanted to do history paintings in the spirit of his master, Napoleon's Don Draper, Jacques-Louis David. This reluctance to use his skills for portraiture is one of the many reasons that he took three years to finish the Comtesse d'Haussonville.

Seven years before he started this work, Ingres arrived at Rome's Villa Medici at two in the morning to take up a position running the place, which was a sort of study retreat for pensioners. Unlike his extroverted predecessor, Ingres was reserved and cultivated a conservative, subdued vibe. Under Ingres, "Everything was somber and gloomy: a lamp in each corner of this immense room, made even darker by the tapestries decorating it," Imagine Madeleine Chapelle Ingres knitting while Monsieur Ingres acts as the life of the downtempo party, conversing with people with a quiet seriousness that commanded your attention. Very few non-Italians got past the red rope and bouncers of Ingres's VIP lounge--one of the few who made the cut was the Swiss-born Viscomtesse--she met Ingres at the Villa two years before he started on this portrait.

During that visit, the Viscomtesse also saw a canvas in which Ingres depicted Stratonice of Syria in a pose with her hand below her chin, similar to the pose in this work. The Viscomtesse, who composed books, including a biography of Byron, wrote that the composition of the Stratonice work "recalls the paintings of Herculaneum," an ancient city preserved, like Pompeii, by the outburst of a local loose-cannon volcano. Ingres's portrayal of this gesture of contemplation from the Comtesse was a direct influence on Henri Lehmann's portrait of Marie d'Agoult. Somehow,  the ample anatomical and perspectival impossibilities in this work make it look even better, anatomy be darned.

Ingres was not happy with this painting as he believed that he had not adequately captured the young woman's charms. However, the Viscomtesse and her family were quite pleased with the result, and one French nobleman even noted that, "M Ingres must be in love with you to have painted you that way," a salacious comment Ingres described as "wicked."