Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (born August 29, 1780, Montauban, France—died January 14, 1867, Paris) was a painter and icon of cultural conservatism in 19th-century France. Ingres became the principal proponent of French Neoclassical painting after the death of his mentor, Jacques-Louis David. His cool, meticulously drawn works constituted the stylistic antithesis of the emotionalism and colorism of the contemporary Romantic school. As a monumental history painter, Ingres sought to perpetuate the Classical tradition of Raphael and Nicolas Poussin. The spatial and anatomical distortions that characterize his portraits and nudes, however, anticipate many of the most audacious formal experiments of 20th-century Modernism.

Early life and works

Ingres received his first artistic instruction from his father, Jean-Marie-Joseph Ingres, an artistic jack-of-all-trades of modest talent but considerable professional and social pretensions. Ingres’s formal education at the school of the Brothers of Christian Doctrine was cut short by the abolition of religious orders in France in 1791, during the Revolution, and so he transferred to the fine arts academy in Toulouse. In 1797 he set out for Paris, where he entered the studio of David, the most celebrated artist in France. Two years later Ingres was accepted into the École des Beaux-Arts. The culmination of his artistic education occurred in 1801, when he was awarded the coveted Prix de Rome, a scholarship given by the French government that allowed art students to study at the Académie de France in Rome. Ingres’s prizewinning painting, The Envoys of Agamemnon, demonstrates his mastery of the standard academic pictorial vocabulary of the day, as well as his attraction to certain stylistic archaisms then coming into fashion.

Because the French treasury, strained by Napoleon’s wars, was unable to pay for his scholarship in Rome, Ingres was forced to remain in Paris. He began to distinguish himself as a portraitist, and in 1804 he fulfilled his first official commission in this genre, Bonaparte as First Consul. Two years later he attracted public attention with a display of several portraits at the Salon, the official state exhibition of contemporary art. Two of his submissions, the portraits of Sabine Rivière and of her 13-year-old daughter, Caroline, introduced the spatial and anatomical manipulations that would typify the artist’s mature portraits, particularly of women. It was, however, the monumental portrait Napoleon I on the Imperial Throne (1806) that proved the most controversial. The stiffness and flat frontality of this imposing effigy were derived from medieval and Byzantine prototypes, while its meticulous detailing and unrelenting surface realism recalled 15th-century Flemish masters. Critics were unanimous in their condemnation of the work, branding Ingres’s willfully primitivizing manner as “Gothic.” It would take the artist two decades to shake this pejorative label.

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Shortly before the opening of the fateful 1806 Salon, Ingres finally set off for Italy, where he continued to follow his own artistic impulses. The officials at the École were disconcerted by the linear severity and tonal sobriety of the two paintings he sent back to Paris in 1808: The Valpinçon Bather and Oedipus and the Sphinx. They were equally critical of the lack of conventional modeling and the outrageous anatomical distortions that characterized the figures in Jupiter and Thetis (1811), the culminating work of Ingres’s student years in Rome.

Maturity

When Ingres’s tenure as a student at the Académie de France in Rome expired in 1810, he opted to remain in Italy, where he had begun to establish himself as a portraitist of Napoleonic officials and dignitaries. He also received occasional commissions in the more prestigious genre of history painting. In 1811 he was invited to participate in the redecoration of the Quirinal Palace, which was in the process of being transformed into Napoleon’s official residence in Rome. Ingres’s contribution consisted of two monumental canvases: Romulus, Conqueror of Acron (1812) and The Dream of Ossian (1813).

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This period of relative prosperity ended abruptly in 1815, with the fall of the Napoleonic empire and the French evacuation of Rome. Opting to remain in Italy, Ingres became desperate for work and resorted to executing small-scale portrait drawings of English and other tourists. These drawings are characterized by an almost uncanny control of delicate yet firm line, an inventiveness in posing sitters so as to reveal personality through gesture, and an impressive capacity to record an exact likeness. Although these portrait drawings are among Ingres’s most widely admired works, he himself scorned them as mere potboilers. Throughout his life, despite his supreme gifts as a portraitist, the artist professed to disdain portraiture and strove instead to establish his credentials as a creator of grand history paintings.

Commissions for monumental paintings were rare, so Ingres contented himself with work on a more restrained scale. It was during this period that he emerged as a master of the so-called “troubadour” genre, paintings of medieval and Renaissance subjects that reflected the artistic mannerisms of the periods depicted. Typical of Ingres’s production in this category is the 1819 painting Paolo and Francesca. The work, which illustrates the tragic demise of two ill-fated lovers from Dante’s Inferno, features somewhat stiff, doll-like figures situated within a radically simplified, boxy interior reminiscent of those found in 14th-century Italian panel paintings. When exhibited at the Salon, such canvases only fueled the attacks of critics, who continued to portray Ingres as a kind of savage intent on taking art back to its infancy.

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A hostile response likewise greeted what would become one of the artist’s most celebrated canvases, La Grande Odalisque (1814). Exhibited in the 1819 Salon, this painting elicited outrage from critics, who ridiculed its radically attenuated modeling as well as Ingres’s habitual anatomical distortions of the female nude. And, indeed, Ingres’s odalisque is a creature totally unknown in nature. The outrageous elongation of her back—one critic famously quipped that she had three vertebrae too many—together with her wildly expanded buttocks and rubbery, boneless right arm constitute a being that could exist only in the erotic imagination of the artist.

Despite the controversy surrounding his nudes, Ingres finally began to turn the critical tide in his favor when he gained recognition as a religious painter. The artist, who moved from Rome to Florence in 1820, adopted a more conventional Classicizing style based directly on the example of his hero, Raphael, in Christ Giving the Keys to Saint Peter (1820), and then again in The Vow of Louis XIII (1824), a blatant piece of pro-Bourbon propaganda celebrating the union of church and state. This picture was a spectacular success at the 1824 Salon, earning Ingres his first critical accolades as well as election to the Académie des Beaux-Arts. Thus, in the span of a single exhibition, he went from being one of the most vilified artists in France to one of the most celebrated.

Heartened by the success of The Vow of Louis XIII, Ingres, who had accompanied the picture to Paris, chose to remain in France. In 1825 he opened a teaching studio, which quickly became one of the largest and most important in Paris. Two years later, at the Salon of 1827, Ingres exhibited his most ambitious history painting to date, The Apotheosis of Homer. A kind of pan-historical group portrait of cultural luminaries influenced by Homer, this picture came to function as a manifesto for the increasingly embattled Neoclassical aesthetic. It also helped establish Ingres as a standard-bearer of cultural conservatism. Critics saw that he was defending the tenets of the waning tradition of French academic Classicism: namely, an unwavering faith in the authority of the ancients, an insistence upon the superiority of drawing over color, and a commitment to the idealization as opposed to the mere replication of nature. In extreme contrast to this vision was the work of Eugène Delacroix, the Romantic painter who also rose to prominence in the Salons of this period. Delacroix advocated the use of often violent, Byronic subject matter as well as sensuous, rich color. The tension between advocates of Classicism and Romanticism would heighten over the following decades.

Although Ingres had achieved his first real success under the stewardship of the Bourbon kings of France, he nonetheless rallied around the more liberal Orléanist regime that arose out of the Revolution of 1830. In 1832 he produced the Portrait of Monsieur Bertin, a pictorial paean to the tenacity of the newly empowered middle class. Ingres’s masterful characterization of his pugnacious sitter, along with the portrait’s mesmerizing realism, earned him popular as well as critical accolades at the 1833 Salon.

Ingres had served as a professor at the École des Beaux-Arts since 1829; in December 1833 he was elected president of that institution for the following year. By this time, however, the artist had begun to be accused of artistic imperialism—of attempting to impose his personal style on the entire French school of painting. Such charges dominated the critical discourse in 1834, when Ingres exhibited the Martyrdom of Saint-Symphorien at the Salon. Rumored beforehand to be his definitive masterpiece, this monumental religious canvas was violently attacked by critics on the political and cultural left, while being no less vehemently defended by Ingres’s allies on the right. Deeply wounded by the lack of universal approbation, the notoriously hypersensitive artist announced that he intended never again to exhibit at the Salon. He solicited and received the post of director of the Académie de France in Rome and set off for Italy in December 1834.

Ingres’s tenure as director of the Académie de France was dominated by administrative and teaching duties. During his six-year stint there, he completed only three major canvases: the so-called Virgin with the Host (1841), Odalisque with Slave (1840), and Antiochus and Stratonice (1840). The exhibition of the latter painting turned the critical tide in Ingres’s favor once more. Encouraged by this success, in 1841 Ingres made a triumphant return to Paris, where he dined with the king and was publicly feted at a banquet attended by more than 400 political and cultural dignitaries.