La Princesse De Broglie Déambule

In La Princesse de Broglie Déambule, Jaxon Northon reimagines one of the most iconic portraits of the 19th century, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’s Princesse de Broglie, through a contemporary lens that is both tender and subversive. While Ingres’s original sits stately and restrained within its Second Empire confines, Northon’s version breaks the subject free. The princess, hair loosened and Marlboro in hand, has left the salon behind. She now walks the banks of the Seine on her own terms—163 years after her death.

This painting was created for Beyond Original, a group exhibition hosted by Modern Eden Gallery, in which artists were invited to reinterpret canonical works from art history. Northon’s selection of Ingres was personal as well as formal: it is, he explains, “my wife’s favorite painting at the Met.” In this version, the princess is played by the artist’s wife, Crystal Sugartown Esparza Northon; an act of homage, yes, but also of intimacy. The recreation becomes a double portrait: one of a historical figure who never quite belonged to her own world, and one of a present-day woman who steps into that role with disarming ease.

The result is a painting that’s lush with contradiction. Northon retains the sumptuous blue satin of the original dress, but trades Ingres’s porcelain idealization for a real human presence; alert, dignified, slightly unguarded. “I borrowed the pose from one of Ingres’s early sketches,” Northon says, “and tried to channel his total disregard for anatomical accuracy—but I’m not as bold as he was.” Still, there’s courage here of a different kind: the willingness to take a beloved image and quietly undo its hierarchy.

In place of the original’s aristocratic enclosure, Northon gives us a 21st-century Paris just beginning to shift into dusk. The background is populated with real landmarks—the Musée d’Orsay, the Passerelle Léopold-Sédar-Senghor—subtly anchoring the fiction in documentary space. What Northon offers, ultimately, is a speculative moment: what if the princess could step out of time and live, even briefly, on her own terms?