The artist Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres was famous for reacting, and overreacting, to criticism. As a young student in Rome, he broke off an engagement to his longtime love in Paris because he couldn’t stomach a return to the salons there, “the scene of my disgrace,” he said. And later, in midcareer, the bad press from another salon outing prompted a second extended stay in Rome.

His thin skin is readily apparent in the drawings and letters that make up “Ingres at the Morgan,” a small gem of a show at the Morgan Library & Museum.

The bulk of the show’s 17 drawings (all but one in the Morgan’s collection) date from Ingres’s first Roman sojourn, from 1806 to 1824. At the time, he was an aspiring history painter who made his living with small portrait sketches of fellow expatriates and wealthy tourists.

He was a fabulous draftsman, even when he would rather have been painting. And he couldn’t help winking at the personalities of his sitters, even the ones he didn’t know well. His drawings of the grand-touring British couple Lord and Lady Glenbervie, for instance, brilliantly convey the husband’s starchy propriety and the wife’s frivolity.