Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres

French painter

• Born: August 29, 1780
• Birthplace: Montauban, near Toulouse, France
• Died: January 14, 1867
• Place of death: Paris, France

Ingres championed sound draftsmanship and inspiration from Greek civilization. His idealized figures and flawless surfaces set an unequaled standard in the first half of the nineteenth century. In elevating aesthetic form and personal expression above orthodoxy, he inadvertently became one of the earliest examples of art for art’s sake, a concept that became important for the later modern movements.

Early Life

Jean-August-Dominique Ingres (ahn-gray) was born into a family of modest means in Montauban in southern France. His father, Joseph, originally from nearby Toulouse, practiced painting, sculpture, and architecture, but without much notice. He encouraged his young son to study the arts in general and gave him lessons in drawing, voice, and violin. By the age of eleven, Ingres was taking instruction in art at the Museum-du-Midi, Toulouse, under Jean Briant, a landscape painter. Not long after that, he entered the Académie de Toulouse to study painting with Guillaume-Joseph Roques and sculpture from Jean-Pierre Vigan. During this period, Ingres did not neglect his music studies.

In 1797, when barely seventeen, Ingres left Toulouse with the son of his first instructor and traveled to Paris. Once there, Ingres was no doubt immediately recognizable as coming from the south of France, because he was short, round-faced, and had an olive complexion. Eventually, his stiff posture and deliberate walk suggested a slight arrogance. Ingres entered the studio of Jacques-Louis David, the greatest French talent of the time. This formal association lasted at least three years, wherein Ingres was thoroughly exposed to David’s brand of neoclassicism in both topical works and commissioned portraits. Their approaches to eighteenth century classicism in art diverged when Ingres’s studio apprenticeship ended. David subscribed to a type of painting activity whose content addressed contemporary issues and moral questions, as he hoped to influence political action. His figures and their settings, however, recalled the Greek republican era. Ingres, by contrast, was generally apolitical and content to explore and alter classical form as a satisfying concept in itself.

In 1800, he competed unsuccessfully for a Prix de Rome. The following year, he earned the coveted award, only to wait five more years in Paris as a result of unfavorable political events in Rome. Nevertheless, Ingres did not languish. Provided with studio space and a modest stipend, he delved into the art of past eras, especially antiquity. Surprisingly, Ingres’s classical education to that point was poor, including a near-total deficiency in Greek and Latin. He began to correct his shortcomings by accumulating a modest library, including Greek and Latin poetry and books whose illustrations attracted him because of their special qualities of line.

Ingres traveled to Rome in 1806 to begin his postponed official stay of four years, but remained at the École de Rome for an additional ten years. The sixteen-year period was productive and was marked by several large commissions from Napoleon I for the Quirinale Palace, paintings sent from Rome as submissions to the annual Paris Salon, and stunning portraits of the French colony in Rome, which were characterized by stylization and purity.

Serious financial constraints, however, developed with the fall of the French Empire, the withdrawal of many in the French colony, and Ingres’s first marriage. Collectively, these factors led to Ingres’s initiation of graphite portraits as a speculative enterprise. This time, the resident English population in Rome provided Ingres with the majority of models, a number of whom were set in family compositions using a vitalistic line and almost no modeling. Already evident in these works is his preference for refined and delicate contour lines verging on the precious.

Ingres spent the years 1820 to 1824 in Florence, gathering data for a religious commission. While there, he came upon the works of Italian primitives that were either unknown or disdained in official circles at the time. These paintings, and the refinement he found in those of the centuries-earlier School of Fountainbleau, surfaced as influences in several quasi-historical genre paintings of that time, such as Roger Freeing Angelica (1819), The Death of Leonardo da Vinci in the Arms of Francis I (c. 1819), and The Vow of Louis XIII (1824).

Life’s Work

Ingres returned to Paris at the end of 1824 and opened a studio that welcomed both commissions and students. He received both quickly. The return was a triumph, and official recognition, which he courted, came quickly too. By 1825, Ingres was awarded the Legion of Honor after experiencing salon success the previous year with The Vow of Louis XIII. The next year, he received a major commission for a ceiling painting in the new extension of the Louvre. It was known as The Apotheosis of Homer ; its format conception was unusual, because it was destined for a ceiling but painted as an upright easel picture because Ingres sought to avoid traditional Baroque foreshortening devices.

Though this painting was received without enthusiasm in the 1827 Salon, it was quite important to Ingres as a defense of the classical tradition in art and, more acutely, as his participation in the neoclassical movement was threatened by the rise of the Romantic movement in painting. In The Apotheosis of Homer, Ingres assembled great men of the past and present, paying tribute to the ancient Greek poet Homer. In fact, it is a group portrait of fine arts luminaries most admired by Ingres, a catalog of his tastes, and, hence, his influences.

Ancient admirers of Homer occupy a raised forecourt in a handsome Ionic peripteral colonnaded temple. At the center of that assembly sits Homer, being crowned by a winged victory figure, enthroned atop a stone base. Seated respectfully below Homer are personifications of the Iliad and the Odyssey. More recent homage bearers occupy the steps and orchestra pit and include Dante, Raphael, Michelangelo, Nicolas Poussin, Jean Racine, William Shakespeare, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and Joseph Haydn. The overall composition was derived from Raphael’s Parnassus and confirms Ingres’s clear debt to the High Renaissance master. Just as important, Ingres valued Raphael as the last of a line of Italian Renaissance primitives, including Fra Filippo Lippi, Sandro Botticelli, and Petro Perugino, in whose art he saw naïveté and mannered grace in contrast to artists after Raphael, in whom Ingres perceived decadence.

The artist’s fear concerning the rise of Romanticism and the decline of classicism did not subside upon completion of The Apotheosis of Homer. Ingres immediately assessed the varied directions in his oeuvre and returned to ideas explored in his École de Rome period. One resulting desire was to reinstate academic studies of the nude to a position of official and critical acceptance, but the climate for that had passed. Ingres did the next best thing; he added figures and occasionally drama to early works and amplified projects once shelved. A brief examination of the artist’s reworked themes easily establishes his intentions for the nude.

Prominent among the rethought paintings is Oedipus Solving the Riddle of the Sphinx (1808), an appealing study of a male nude in an acceptable antique pose with a respectably engaging myth as a foil for the artist’s interest in human form. By 1827, it was enlarged and altered by the addition of a Theban in the background fleeing Oedipus’s audacity in terror. The Theban’s fright contrasts dramatically to the poise and concentration of Oedipus. The work was a salon success in 1827, but it typified a problem in European academic art of the time. Serious artists attached to the human form had to place their figures in historical, biblical, or mythological scenes lest the compositions be criticized as vulgar by salon juries. The attitude became entrenched, discouraging innovation while demanding technical excellence. Almost by default, it encouraged a glut of uninspired formula art. Ingres himself avoided academic mediocrity by building a career of fresh invention.

Even more of a testament to Ingres’s faith in classicism was the ambitious work Antiochus and Stratonice , begun in 1807 and thoroughly transformed during the 1830’s. The subject, originally told by Plutarch, was familiar to Ingres and his contemporaries in painting and theater during their student years in Paris and Rome. Ingres’s second version illustrated the moment when a physician diagnosed the bedridden Antiochus’s illness (by a racing pulse) as passion for his stepmother, Stratonice.

Ingres spent six years on the painting in Italy, where he had accepted the directorship of the École de Rome. He did so after being rejected by the Salon of 1834, vowing not to submit again. He researched the correct period setting, documented local color, constructed the convincing illusion of a three-dimensional interior with an air of gravity yet style, and tested forty-five times the gesture of Antiochus shielding himself from the near-fatal view of Stratonice. In 1840, the tenaciously constructed painting was shown privately in Paris at the Palais Royal, where it was a critical success, one that set the stage for Ingres’s triumphant return to the capital city the next year.

Throughout his career, Ingres was obsessed with the potential of the female form for serene grace, especially the undraped female form. By the 1830’s and 1840’s, he was reworking single figures and groups devoted to sensuality. The Bathing Woman , a small half-torso study of 1807, and The Valpincon Bather of 1808 were the first of a long series of those expressions. In both pictures, the models are viewed discreetly, with turned heads and long, curved backs. A full-length, reclining nude also viewed from the back was used in 1814 for The Grand Odalisque , a statement of languid beauty and fantasized oriental exoticism, complete with feathers, silks, fur, jewelry, and incense.

In 1839, Ingres returned to the motif of the reposing nude in an oriental world. Entitled Odalisque with the Slave , the work benefited from a study of Persian miniatures and exotic bric-a-brac. Ingres’s careerlong obsession with pliant female nudes culminated with The Turkish Bath of 1863, four years before the artist’s death. The tondo-framed painting presents some two dozen nudes in a harem, bathing, lounging aimlessly, or admiring themselves.

There was at least one more vital aspect to Ingres’s fascination with women, namely portraiture, especially of the rising middle class that dominated French society by the mid-1850’s. As with the nudes, Ingres found helpful precedents in his own early work, for example, the 1805 portraits of Madame and Mademoiselle Rivière. Ingres’s major portraits of the last phase of his career include the Vicomtesse d’Haussonville (1845), the Baronne de Rothschild (1848), two interpretations of Madame Moitessier in 1851 and 1856, and Princess de Broglie (1856). Collectively, the portraits project sensuality, a sense of power, the deceit of informality borrowed from David, and certainly the artist’s love of flesh, hair, lush fabrics, patterns, and jewelry. These captivating women seem suitably dressed to receive visitors or to attend a ball.

When Ingres returned to Paris in 1841, he was immediately the honoree of a banquet with 426 guests presided over by the Marquis de Pastoret, plus a concert organized by the composer Hector Berlioz. More honors and commissions followed. One year before his death, Ingres bequeathed to the city of Montauban a collection of his own paintings and drawings, plus prints, books, Etruscan sarcophagi, Greek vases, and musical scores. In return, the city of his birth established the Musée Ingres in 1869 in his honor.

Significance

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres reached a position of prestige and professional success enjoyed by few other artists active from the Renaissance through the nineteenth century. However, his life and art were full of contradictions and paradoxes. For example, constantly acclaimed as the chief exponent of neoclassicism, he was actually one player in a larger heterogeneous artistic and literary community known as Romanticism. Furthermore, despite his adamant positions supporting classicism and academic techniques, his art could be just as arbitrary as that of his primary rival, Eugène Delacroix, leader of the Romantic movement in painting. Ingres, the neoclassicist, mastered historical genre painting, religious themes, and realistic portraiture. He managed to stay in official favor through the successive regimes of Napoleon I, the Bourbon Restoration, the civil wars of 1830 and 1848, and Napoleon III, though he detested change. Perhaps part of his genius is tied to his refusal to be locked into historical time. After all, he refused to change with the prevailing winds of art throughout his life.

Ingres professed to copy nature, stressing drawing as the first commandment of high art, using live models, and emphasizing the contours of forms. Yet, as if he were blinded by an obsession for human form, his figures frequently had suspect proportions, extra vertebrae, and rubbery necks. To Ingres, distortions and a mannered anatomy were justified in the service of his uppermost aims: first, the expression of humankind’s feelings and situations, second, the attempt to place hybrid people in an idealized nature at once divine and within the measure of contemporary existence.

Bibliography

Condon, Patricia, et al. Ingres, in Pursuit of Perfection: The Art of J.-A.-D. Ingres. Louisville, Ky.: J. B. Speed Art Museum, 1983. A superbly crafted and highly didactic exhibition catalog. Draws together many versions and studies of works unlikely to have been seen in the United States until this exhibit and publication. Illustrations are of excellent quality and satisfying in number. The thoughtful appendix summarizing the artist’s ancient and contemporary themes, plus the exhaustive separate indexes listing the artist’s works by subject, location, medium, date provenance, and exhibition, are extraordinary.

Cummings, Frederick J., et al. French Painting, 1774-1830: The Age of Revolution. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1975. This 712-page book serves as a necessary aid in comprehending a blockbuster exhibition devoted to major and minor painters grouped under four historical periods: Louis XVI, Napoleon I, the Bourbon Restoration, and Napoleon III. Cummings and other authors weave events in art, politics, and intellectual thought and re-create the concept of period styles.

Ingres, Jean-Auguste-Dominique. Ingres. Text by Jon Whiteley. London: Oresko Books, 1977. A relatively brief but well-prepared and well-illustrated overview of the artist’s major themes. Seventy carefully chosen works representing Ingres’s lengthy career make up the plate portion. Eight appear in acceptable color. Most valuable are the well-researched and easily read notes adjacent to the illustrations.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Ingres. Text by Georges Wildenstein. 2d ed. London: Phaidon Press, 1956. Part of Phaidon’s French Art series, this work contains a concise examination of the artist’s natural gifts and the goals he set for them as well as a discussion of his techniques. The chronology of Ingres’s life is lengthy and detailed. The plate section of two hundred images, including good details, is highlighted by six key works in color.

Picon, Gaëton. Ingres: A Biographical and Critical Study. Translated by Stuart Gilbert. 2d ed. New York: Rizzoli, 1980. A large-format, handsomely produced monograph. Easily understood by professionals outside the field of art. The selected bibliography is extensive. The chronologically thorough listing of Ingres’s exhibitions up to 1980 will assist serious students. Includes more than fifty images.

Ribeiro, Aileen. Ingres in Fashion: Representations of Dress and Appearance in Ingres’s Images of Women. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1999. Riberio, a dress historian, analyzes how clothing, accessories, and fabrics define and display the women in Ingres’s portraits. Features more than 150 illustrations.

Rifkin, Adrian. Ingres Then, and Now. London: Routledge, 2000. Rifkin reinterprets Ingres’s nineteenth century work within the context of twentieth century popular culture. Contains more than fifty images.

Vigne, Georges. Ingres. Translated from the French by John Goodman. New York: Abbeville, 1995. In this lavishly illustrated study, Vigne, the curator of the Musee Ingres in Montauban, France, examines Ingres’s artistic life. The appendixes include reproductions of Ingres’s notebooks in which he listed his paintings, a bibliography, and an exhibition list.