Regarding Ingres: Fourteen Short Stories

“a collection of 14 prose gems, each reflecting in its own way the masterwork of one of the greatest portraitists who ever lived. . . . these stories dazzle and delight.”

The Poetry Foundation defines an ekphrastic work as “a vivid description of a scene or, more commonly, a work of art. Through the imaginative act of narrating and reflecting on the ‘action’ of a painting or sculpture, the poet may amplify and expand its meaning.” Notable examples include John Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn” or the fall of Icarus as depicted in Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s famous 16th century landscape painting and subsequently translated into verse by W. H. Auden in “Musée des Beaux Arts.”

All 14 short stories gathered in this collection are ekphrastic fictional responses to Jean-August-Dominique Ingres’s Comtesse d’Haussonville (1845) which resides in the Frick Collection in New York. The editor of Regarding Ingres, Darin Strauss, was asked the following question by the Frick: Would his “NYU writing class take on—for publication—a famous portrait by a famous portraitist?” The answer to that question is this amazing panoply of short fictions that riff, in a most satisfactory variety of fashions, on Ingres’s masterpiece of portraiture

In Alanna Weissman’s “These Useless Hands: A Polyptych,” for example, the POV character is the subject of Ingres’s famous portrait: Louise, Princesse de Broglie. But in this powerful reimagining of Louise’s 19th century life, the young woman who would later be painted as the Comtesse d’Haussonville is responsible for the drowning of her little sister, Elise. Louise’s failure to save Elise haunts her—at first figuratively, and then literally.

On their honeymoon, the Count takes Louise to the Amalfi Coast, where she revisits the site of her sister’s drowning and is gorgeously reunited with Elise’s ghost, which becomes her constant companion in life: “The red rose that had been tied into Elise’s chignon fluttered from her loose hair to the ground. Then she returned to Louise, and they walked hand in hand along the beach back to the cottage.” Indeed, Elise is present in spirit when Ingres paints Louise’s portrait.

In poignant contrast, a short-short by Anushka Joshi entitled “The Shawl” links that title garment, as depicted in the Ingres painting, to British colonialism in India and Pakistan and its brutal legacy both pre- and post-Partition. In the words of the first-person narrator, “If I could, I would reach into the painting and take out the shawl, which does not belong there just as the sword of Tipu Sultan and the Koh-i-Noor do not belong in their museums. I would place it instead on the shoulders of my grandfather’s friend, the one who fought for freedom . . .”  

But perhaps the most fascinating story in the collection, “Self-Conscious,” by Madeline McFarland, focuses on a present-day young mother named Louise who has issues with her self-image after giving birth. In an attempt to raise her spirits, Louise’s husband gifts her with a photo shoot by a “friend from prep school, August . . . a famous photographer working in New York.” Despite Louise’s fears that the photos would be unflattering at best, one of the resulting images is so powerful that August features it in a show which Louise and her husband are invited to attend.

The photograph, as described first through the eyes of Louise’s husband and then as seen by Louise herself, perfectly mirrors the Ingres painting, including its “alterations not just of the reality of her appearance but of reality itself: her angles changed, the proportions of her body shifted . . .” The story ends with Louise’s reaction to the artistic depiction of herself, as “reaching out to it, [she] fell in love with its irregular, extraordinary grace.” This is true ekphrasis at its finest—the photographic reflection of a painting captured perfectly in prose.

Regarding Ingres is a collection of 14 prose gems, each reflecting in its own way the masterwork of one of the greatest portraitists who ever lived. From the first facet to the last, these stories dazzle and delight.