Art card Ingres La Source, Musée du Louvre, Braun et Compagnie

French art postcard reproducing in sepia La Source, a painting by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres held in the collection of the Musee du Louvre, published by Braun et Compagnie under number 10422. The composition shows a standing female nude holding an antique water pitcher tilted over her shoulder, from which a stream of water falls into a basin at her feet, set within a dark rocky recess with leafy foliage. The caption reads "Musee du Louvre" and "Ingres, La source", with the publisher's mark B.C. The card is executed in fine rotogravure with a warm sepia tone, unposted, in good condition with slight edge discolouration and minimal handling marks.

La Source is one of the emblematic works of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, on which he worked with long interruptions from around 1820 until its completion in 1856, the year in which he exhibited it at the age of seventy-six. The figure draws on an ancient iconographic tradition of the personified spring as a symbol of purity, youth and origin, yet carries that tradition, through the cool linearity and porcelain flesh tone characteristic of Ingres, into the first rank of the most widely reproduced nudes in nineteenth-century French painting. Braun et Compagnie, based at Dornach and Paris, was during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the official photographer of the French national museum collections, and issued in that capacity substantial series of postcards after works from the Louvre, the Luxembourg and Versailles.