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Last years (1841–1867)

One of the first works executed after his return to Paris was a portrait of the duc d'Orléans. After the heir to the throne was killed in a carriage accident a few months after the painting was completed in 1842, Ingres received commissions to make additional copies. He also received a commission to design seventeen stained glass windows for the chapel on the place where the accident occurred, and a commission for eight additional stained-glass designs for Orléans chapel in Dreux. He became a professor at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. He took his students frequently to the Louvre to the see the classical and Renaissance art, instructing them to look straight ahead and to avoid the works of Rubens, which he believed deviated too far from the true values of art.

The Revolution of 1848, which overthrew Louis Philippe and created the French Second Republic, had little effect on his work or his ideas. He declared that the revolutionaries were "cannibals who called themselves French", but during the Revolution completed his Venus Anadyomene, which he had started as an academic study in 1808. It represented Venus, rising from the sea which had given birth to her, surrounded by cherubs. He welcomed the patronage of the new government of Louis-Napoleon, who in 1852 became Emperor Napoleon III.

In 1843 Ingres began the decorations of the great hall in the Château de Dampierre with two large murals, the Golden Age and the Iron Age, illustrating the origins of art. He made more than five hundred preparatory drawings, and worked on the enormous project for six years. In an attempt to imitate the effect of Renaissance frescos, he chose to paint the murals in oil on plaster, which created technical difficulties. Work on the Iron Age never progressed beyond the architectural background painted by an assistant. Meanwhile, the growing crowd of nudes in the Golden Age discomfited Ingres's patron, the Duc de Luynes, and Ingres suspended work on the mural in 1847. Ingres was devastated by the loss of his wife, who died on 27 July 1849, and he was finally unable to complete the work. In July 1851, he announced a gift of his artwork to his native city of Montauban, and in October he resigned as professor at the École des Beaux-Arts.

However, in 1852, Ingres, then seventy-one years of age, married forty-three-year-old Delphine Ramel, a relative of his friend Marcotte d'Argenteuil. Ingres was rejuvenated, and in the decade that followed he completed several significant works, including the portrait of Princesse Albert de Broglie, née Joséphine-Eléonore-Marie-Pauline de Galard de Brassac de Béarn. In 1853 he began the Apotheosis of Napoleon I, for the ceiling of a hall in the Hôtel de Ville, Paris. (It was destroyed in May 1871 when the Paris Commune set fire to the building.) With the help of assistants, in 1854 he completed another history painting, Joan of Arc at the Coronation of Charles VII. A retrospective of his works was featured at the Paris Universal Exposition of 1855, and in the same year Napoleon III named him a Grand Officer of the Légion d'honneur. In 1862 he was awarded the title of Senator, and made a member of the Imperial Council on Public Instruction. Three of his works were shown in the London International Exhibition, and his reputation as a major French painter was confirmed once more.

He continued to rework and refine his classic themes. In 1856 Ingres completed The Source (The Spring), a painting begun in 1820 and closely related to his Venus Anadyoméne. He painted two versions of Louis XIV and Molière (1857 and 1860), and produced variant copies of several of his earlier compositions. These included religious works in which the figure of the Virgin from The Vow of Louis XIII was reprised: The Virgin of the Adoption of 1858 (painted for Mademoiselle Roland-Gosselin) was followed by The Virgin Crowned (painted for Madame la Baronne de Larinthie) and The Virgin with Child. In 1859 he produced new versions of The Virgin of the Host, and in 1862 he completed Christ and the Doctors, a work commissioned many years before by Queen Marie Amalie for the chapel of Bizy. He painted small replicas of Paolo and Francesca and Oedipus and the Sphinx. In 1862 he completed a small oil-on-paper version of The Golden Age. The last of his important portrait paintings date from this period: Marie-Clothilde-Inés de Foucauld, Madame Moitessier, Seated (1856), Self-Portrait at the Age of Seventy-eight and Madame J.-A.-D. Ingres, née Delphine Ramel, both completed in 1859. At the request of the Uffizi Gallery of Florence, he made his own-self portrait in 1858. The only colour in the painting is the red of his rosette of the Legion of Honour.

Near the end of his life, he made one of his best-known masterpieces, The Turkish Bath. It reprised a figure and theme he had been painting since 1828, with his Petite Baigneuse. Originally completed in a square format in 1852 and sold to Prince Napoleon in 1859, it was returned to the artist soon afterward—according to a legend, Princess Clothilde was shocked by the abundant nudity. After reworking the painting as a tondo, Ingres signed and dated it in 1862, although he made additional revisions in 1863. The painting was eventually purchased by a Turkish diplomat, Khalid Bey, who owned a large collection of nudes and erotic art, including several paintings by Courbet. The painting continued to cause a scandal long after Ingres was dead. It was initially offered to the Louvre in 1907, but was rejected, before being given to the Louvre in 1911.

Ingres died of pneumonia on 14 January 1867, at the age of eighty-six, in his apartment on the Quai Voltaire in Paris. He is interred in the Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris with a tomb sculpted by his student Jean-Marie Bonnassieux. The contents of his studio, including a number of major paintings, over 4000 drawings, and his violin, were bequeathed by the artist to the city museum of Montauban, now known as the Musée Ingres.