Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres died at eighty-six on the 14th of January 1867, in his apartment on the Quai Voltaire in Paris, and his studio held more than four thousand drawings. He left them all to the city of Montauban, the southern French town where he was born. He also left his violin. That instrument is not a minor detail. It gave the French language a phrase it still uses: "violon d'Ingres" - a second skill beyond the one for which a person is mainly known. A painter who spent decades fighting to be recognized as a master of history painting, who ended up celebrated instead for his portraits, who was dismissed as archaic by critics only to be hailed as a prophet by Picasso and Matisse: the paradoxes of Ingres run deep. How did a man so devoted to the past become one of the most important precursors of modern art? And how did a painter who despised portraiture produce what Baudelaire called the truest portraits in France?

• 2. A Painter Forged in Toulouse

  ›

  Ingres was born on the 29th of August 1780 in Montauban, the first of seven children, five of whom survived infancy. His father was a jack-of-all-trades in the arts: painter of miniatures, sculptor, decorative stonemason, and amateur musician. His mother was the nearly illiterate daughter of a master wigmaker. From his father the young Ingres received early instruction in drawing and music, and his first known drawing, a study after an antique cast, dates to 1789. The closing of his local school in 1791, forced by the upheavals of the French Revolution, ended his formal education. The gap in his schooling was a source of insecurity for the rest of his life.

  In 1791, his father took him to Toulouse, where he enrolled in the Academie Royale de Peinture, Sculpture et Architecture. There he studied under a sculptor, a landscape painter, and the neoclassical painter Guillaume-Joseph Roques, whose veneration of Raphael left a permanent mark on the young artist. Ingres won prizes across several disciplines and developed musically under the violinist Lejeune. Between the ages of thirteen and sixteen he played second violin in the Orchestre du Capitole de Toulouse. From an early age his ambition was fixed: he wanted to be a history painter, the highest rank in the hierarchy established by the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture under Louis XIV. He did not want to paint real life as his father had done. He wanted to represent the heroes of religion, history, and mythology, to idealize them in the manner of the greatest literature and philosophy.

• 3. David's Studio and the Prix de Rome

  ›

  In August 1797, Ingres traveled to Paris to study under Jacques-Louis David, France's leading painter during the revolutionary period. He stayed in David's studio for four years. A fellow student, Etienne-Jean Delecluze, who later became an art critic, described the young Ingres with precision: distinguished by "the finesse of contour, the true and profound sentiment of the form, and a modelling with extraordinary correctness and firmness" - qualities already visible in his early studies. He was admitted to the painting department of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in October 1799, and won the grand prize for figure painting in both 1800 and 1801.

  In 1801 he took the top prize at the Prix de Rome with The Ambassadors of Agamemnon in the tent of Achilles. The painting already showed a tension that would define his career: the envoys on the right were muscular and solid, painted in David's style, while the two main figures on the left were mobile and graceful, like figures in a delicate bas-relief. His residence in Rome was then postponed until 1806 due to a shortage of state funds. During those years in Paris he absorbed Raphael, Etruscan vase paintings, and the outline engravings of the English artist John Flaxman. His friend Lorenzo Bartolini introduced him to the Italian Renaissance paintings Napoleon had brought back from his campaigns and placed in the Louvre, including the Ghent Altarpiece by Jan van Eyck, which the French army had seized during its conquest of Flanders. Art historian Marjorie Cohn observed that at the time, "art history as a scholarly enquiry was brand-new," and French artists found themselves with an unprecedented opportunity to study masterworks from antiquity and from across the entire history of European painting. Critics would later accuse Ingres of plundering the past. He did not see it that way.

• 4. Years of Hostility in Rome and Florence

  ›

  At the Salon of 1806, Ingres exhibited his Self-Portrait, the Riviere family portraits, and his enormous Napoleon I on his Imperial Throne - a painting almost entirely consumed by the lavish imperial costume, with the Emperor's face and hands nearly lost in the golden furs and chains and capes. The critic Chaussard praised the fineness of Ingres's brushwork but condemned his style as gothic, asking how a painter with such talent "succeeded in painting a bad picture." David delivered a severe judgment. Ingres, newly arrived in Rome, read the press clippings sent by friends with mounting indignation. In letters to his prospective father-in-law he called the critics scoundrels and vowed never again to exhibit at the Salon. His refusal to return to Paris led directly to the end of his engagement to Marie-Anne-Julie Forestier. When asked years later why she had never married, Forestier replied: "When one has had the honor of being engaged to M. Ingres, one does not marry."

  On the 23rd of November 1806 he wrote to Jean Forestier: "Yes, art will need to be reformed, and I intend to be that revolutionary." Characteristically, he found a studio on the grounds of the Villa Medici away from the other resident artists and painted furiously. Required to send progress samples to Paris, he dispatched a painting of the back of a young woman bathing and the first Ingres model to wear a turban, a detail borrowed from the Fornarina by Raphael. He also sent Oedipus and the Sphinx to demonstrate his mastery of the male nude. The academicians in Paris judged the figures insufficiently idealized.

  In 1813 Ingres married Madeleine Chapelle, recommended by her friends in Rome, after a courtship conducted entirely through correspondence - he proposed without having met her, and she accepted. Their marriage was happy. After a difficult childbirth in 1815 resulted in a stillborn baby, the couple remained childless. He continued to receive hostile critical responses at the Salon while supporting himself and his wife through pencil portrait drawings of wealthy tourists, particularly the English, passing through postwar Rome. To visitors who knocked at his door asking whether this was where "the man who draws the little portraits lives," he answered with irritation: "No, the man who lives here is a painter!" He is estimated to have made some five hundred portrait drawings during this period. His friends included many musicians, and he regularly played the violin with others who shared his enthusiasm for Mozart, Haydn, Gluck, and Beethoven. In 1820 he and his wife moved to Florence at the urging of Lorenzo Bartolini. His history painting Roger Freeing Angelica was purchased for the private collection of Louis XVIII and hung in the Musee du Luxembourg in Paris - the first work of Ingres to enter a museum. Then, in August 1820, he received a commission for a major religious painting for the Cathedral of Montauban, which he would spend four years completing.

• 5. Recognition and its Discontents

  ›

  The Vow of Louis XIII arrived at the Paris Salon in October 1824 and changed everything. Inspired by Raphael and painted in the Renaissance style, it depicted King Louis XIII vowing to dedicate his reign to the Virgin Mary. The journalist and future Prime Minister Adolphe Thiers celebrated it as evidence of a new style. Most critics praised it. In January 1825 Ingres was awarded the Cross of the Legion d'honneur by Charles X, and in June 1825 he was elected a member of the Academie des Beaux-Arts. Lithographs of La Grande Odalisque were published in 1826 and found eager buyers; Ingres received 24,000 francs for the reproduction rights - twenty times the amount he had been paid for the original painting six years earlier.

  The same 1824 Salon also introduced a counter-current: Eugene Delacroix exhibited Les Massacres de Scio, in a Romantic style sharply contrasting to that of Ingres. The rivalry deepened at the 1827 Salon, where Ingres presented the Apotheosis of Homer and Delacroix answered with The Death of Sardanapalus. Ingres called Delacroix "the apostle of ugliness" while acknowledging his talent and warning that "he has tendencies which I believe are dangerous and which I must push back." Paris artists and intellectuals were passionately divided.

  His portrait of Louis-Francois Bertin, chief editor of the Journal des Debats, was exhibited at the Salon of 1833 and was a particular public success. Ingres had originally planned to paint Bertin standing, but many hours of effort ended in a creative impasse before he settled on a seated pose. Edouard Manet later described the result as "The Buddha of the Bourgeoisie." The portrait became a symbol of the rising economic and political power of Bertin's social class. Then in 1834 came The Martyrdom of Saint Symphorian, a painting Ingres had worked on for ten years and conceived as the summation of all his skill. It was attacked by both the neoclassicists and the Romantics. In anger, Ingres announced he would no longer submit his work for public judgment, and at the end of 1834 he returned to Rome to become Director of the Academy of France.

• 6. The Paradox of the Portraits

  ›

  Baudelaire, who called Ingres "the sole man in France who truly makes portraits," understood something that Ingres himself resisted: the work he produced most reluctantly was the work he did best. His portraits, both painted and drawn, are now recognized as his greatest legacy. His own complaint was that the demands of portraiture robbed him of time he could have spent on history paintings.

  For his female portraits, Ingres often posed the subject after a classical statue. The famous portrait of the Comtesse d'Haussonville may have been modeled after a Roman statue called "Pudicity" in the Vatican collection. He painted the fabrics and details of his portraits with extreme precision while idealizing the face: the viewer, perceiving the fabrics as realistic, would assume the face was equally true. His drawn portraits required four hours to complete - an hour and a half in the morning and two and a half hours in the afternoon. His student Raymond Balze noted that Ingres "often told me that he got the essence of the portrait while lunching with the model who, off guard, became more natural."

  About 450 of his portrait drawings survive. Scholar Agnes Mongan wrote that before Ingres left Paris for Rome in 1806, the familiar characteristics of his drawing style were already fully established: "the delicate yet firm contour, the definite yet discreet distortions of form, the almost uncanny capacity to seize a likeness." While his paintings were criticized as gothic, Mongan observed, "no comparable criticism was leveled at his drawings." Critic John Canaday wrote that the drawings revealed sitters' personalities by means so subtle that Ingres could "expose the vanities of a fop, a silly woman, or a windbag, in drawings that delighted them." The last of his important portrait paintings date from his final years: Madame Moitessier, Seated was completed in 1856, and his self-portrait for the Uffizi Gallery of Florence in 1858. The only color in the Uffizi self-portrait is the red of his rosette of the Legion of Honour.

• 7. The Afterlife of a Contrarian

  ›

  Ingres's deliberate distortions of form and anatomy, which had drawn hostile fire for decades, became a resource for the artists who came after him. Henri Matisse described him as the first painter "to use pure colours, outlining them without distorting them." At the Salon d'automne of 1905 in Paris, a major retrospective of Ingres's work was seen by Picasso, Matisse, and many other artists. The composition of The Turkish Bath, shown publicly for the first time, had a visible influence on the poses and composition of Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon in 1907. Matisse took the theme of women dancing in a circle from Ingres's studies for the unfinished mural L'Age d'or and produced his own version, La Danse, in 1909. The particular pose and colouring of the Portrait of Monsieur Bertin reappeared in Picasso's Portrait of Gertrude Stein in 1906.

  Barnett Newman credited Ingres as a progenitor of abstract expressionism, saying: "That guy was an abstract painter... He looked at the canvas more often than at the model. Kline, de Kooning - none of us would have existed without him." Curator Pierre Barousse of the Musee Ingres observed that artists from the most conventional of the nineteenth century to the most revolutionary of the twentieth, from Matisse to Picasso, claimed Ingres as their master. Barousse noted that his attitude was "fundamentally different to that of David" and resulted in "a truly personal and unique art admired as much by the Cubists for its plastic autonomy, as by the Surrealists for its visionary qualities."

  The Turkish Bath itself had one last scandal to offer. Originally completed in 1852 in a square format and sold to Prince Napoleon in 1859, it was returned to the artist shortly afterward - according to legend, because Princess Clothilde was shocked by the abundant nudity. Ingres reworked it as a circular tondo, signed and dated it in 1862, and made further revisions in 1863. It was initially offered to the Louvre in 1907 but rejected, before being accepted in 1911, forty-four years after his death.

• 8. Violon d'Ingres

  ›

  Ingres's passion for the violin was known to everyone who spent time near him. He had played second violin in the Orchestre du Capitole de Toulouse as a teenager, and the instrument never left him. When he was Director of the French Academy in Rome, he played Beethoven string quartets with Niccolo Paganini and welcomed Franz Liszt and Fanny Mendelssohn into the Academy's musical life. Composer Charles Gounod, who was a student at the Academy during Ingres's directorship, wrote that Ingres "had the tenderness of an infant and the indignation of an apostle." When Stendhal visited the Academy and disparaged Beethoven, Ingres turned to the doorman and instructed him: "If this gentleman ever calls again, I am not here."

  In an 1839 letter, Liszt described Ingres's violin playing as "charming" and expressed plans to play through all the Mozart and Beethoven violin sonatas with him. Liszt dedicated his transcriptions of the 5th and 6th symphonies of Beethoven to Ingres on their original publication in 1840. Gounod noted that Ingres "was not a professional, even less a virtuoso," but the playing was beside the point. The violin was what the French language eventually named after him. "Violon d'Ingres" entered the language as a phrase for a second skill beyond the one by which a person is mainly known. The American avant-garde artist Man Ray took the expression a step further in a famous photograph: he posed Alice Prin, known as Kiki de Montparnasse, in the stance of the Valpincon Bather and painted two f-holes on her back, turning the human figure into a violin. At his death, Ingres bequeathed his violin, along with more than four thousand drawings, to the city of Montauban.