Moitessier, Marie-Clothilde-Inès

Biography

The daughter of Charles-Edouard-Armand de Foucauld and his wife Clotilde-Eugènie, née Belfoy, Marie-Clotilde-Inès, called Inès, married Paul Sigisbert Moitessier [1799-1889], twenty-two years her senior, on 16 June 1842. They had two daughters, Clotilde-Marie-Catherine [1843-1914], and Françoise-Camille-Marie [1850-1934], both of whom later married into the nobility. The family is also distinguished by Mme. Moitessier's nephew, Charles Eugène de Foucauld, the son of her brother François. Charles Eugène de Foucauld became a Trappist Monk of some reknown in Morocco, where he was assassinated in 1913. Inès' father was an official in the French government's Department of Waters and Forests. The director of this department, Charles Marcotte, acted as an intermediary between his good friend, the painter Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, and the Moitessiers. Ingres completed two now-famous portraits of Marie Moitessier (one in the NGA, the other in the National Gallery at London). After Mme. Moitessier's death in 1897, both pictures came into the possession of her elder daughter, Catherine, who in 1862 had become the wife of the Comte de Flavigny. The paintings later passed to her younger sister Marie, married in 1874 to Vicomte Olivier Taillepied de Bondy, and in turn their son, the Comte Taillepied de Bondy. Mme Moitessier died at her home on the Rue d'Anjou in 1897.

Bibliography

1969

Naef, Hans. "New material on Ingres's portraits of Mme Moitessier." The Burlington Magazine 111 (March 1969): 149-150.

Related Content