Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres ( ANG-grə; French: [ʒɑ̃ oɡyst dɔminik ɛ̃ɡʁ]; 29 August 1780 – 14 January 1867) was a French Neoclassical painter. Ingres was profoundly influenced by past artistic traditions and aspired to become the guardian of academic orthodoxy against the ascendant Romantic style. Although he considered himself a painter of history in the tradition of Nicolas Poussin and Jacques-Louis David, it is his portraits, both painted and drawn, that are recognized as his greatest legacy. His expressive distortions of form and space made him an important precursor of modern art, influencing Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, and other modernists.

Born into a modest family in Montauban, he travelled to Paris to study in the studio of David. In 1802 he made his Salon debut, and won the Prix de Rome for his painting The Ambassadors of Agamemnon in the tent of Achilles. By the time he departed in 1806 for his residency in Rome, his style—revealing his close study of Italian and Flemish Renaissance masters—was fully developed, and would change little for the rest of his life. While working in Rome and subsequently Florence from 1806 to 1824, he regularly sent paintings to the Paris Salon, where they were faulted by critics who found his style bizarre and archaic. He received few commissions during this period for the history paintings he aspired to paint, but was able to support himself and his wife as a portrait painter and draughtsman.

He was finally recognized at the Salon in 1824, when his Raphaelesque painting, The Vow of Louis XIII, was met with acclaim, and Ingres was acknowledged as the leader of the Neoclassical school in France. Although the income from commissions for history paintings allowed him to paint fewer portraits, his Portrait of Monsieur Bertin marked his next popular success in 1833. The following year, his indignation at the harsh criticism of his ambitious composition The Martyrdom of Saint Symphorian caused him to return to Italy, where he assumed directorship of the French Academy in Rome in 1835. He returned to Paris for good in 1841. In his later years he painted new versions of many of his earlier compositions, a series of designs for stained glass windows, several important portraits of women, and The Turkish Bath, the last of his several Orientalist paintings of the female nude, which he finished at the age of 83.

Ingres was born in Montauban, Tarn-et-Garonne, France, the first of seven children (five of whom survived infancy) of Jean-Marie-Joseph Ingres (1755–1814) and his wife Anne Moulet (1758–1817). His father was a successful jack-of-all-trades in the arts, a 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 encouragement and instruction in drawing and music, and his first known drawing, a study after an antique cast, was made in 1789. Starting in 1786, he attended the local school École des Frères de l'Éducation Chrétienne, but his education was disrupted by the turmoil of the French Revolution, and the closing of the school in 1791 marked the end of his conventional education. The deficiency in his schooling would always remain for him a source of insecurity.

In 1791, Joseph Ingres took his son to Toulouse, where the young Jean-Auguste-Dominique was enrolled in the Académie Royale de Peinture, Sculpture et Architecture. There he studied under the sculptor Jean-Pierre Vigan, the landscape painter Jean Briant, and the neoclassical painter Guillaume-Joseph Roques. Roques' veneration of Raphael was a decisive influence on the young artist. Ingres won prizes in several disciplines, such as composition, "figure and antique", and life studies. His musical talent was developed under the tutelage of the violinist Lejeune, and from the ages of thirteen to sixteen he played second violin in the Orchestre du Capitole de Toulouse.

From an early age he was determined to be a history painter, which, in the hierarchy of genres established by the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture under Louis XIV, and continued well into the 19th Century, was considered the highest level of painting. He did not want to simply make portraits or illustrations of real life like his father; he wanted to represent the heroes of religion, history and mythology, to idealize them and show them in ways that explained their actions, rivaling the best works of literature and philosophy.

In March 1797, the Academy awarded Ingres first prize in drawing, and in August he traveled to Paris to study in the studio of Jacques-Louis David, France's—and Europe's—leading painter during the revolutionary period, in whose studio he remained for four years. Ingres followed his master's neoclassical example. In 1797 David was working on his enormous masterpiece, The Intervention of the Sabine Women, and was gradually modifying his style away from Roman models of rigorous realism to the ideals of purity, virtue and simplicity in Greek art.

One of the other students of David, Étienne-Jean Delécluze, who later became an art critic, described Ingres as a student: He was distinguished not just by the candor of his character and his disposition to work alone ... he was one of the most studious ... he took little part in the all the turbulent follies around him, and he studied with more perseverance than most of his co-disciples ... All of the qualities which characterize today the talent of this artist, the finesse of contour, the true and profound sentiment of the form, and a modeling with extraordinary correctness and firmness, could already be seen in his early studies. While several of his comrades and David himself signaled a tendency toward exaggeration in his studies, everyone was struck by his grand compositions and recognized his talent. He was admitted to the painting department of the École des Beaux-Arts in October 1799. In 1800 and 1801, he won the grand prize for figure painting for his paintings of male torsos. He competed for the Prix de Rome between 1800 and 1801, for the highest prize of the Academy, which entitled the winner to four years of residence at the French Academy in Rome. He came in second in his first attempt, but in 1801 he took the top prize with The Ambassadors of Agamemnon in the tent of Achilles. The figures of the envoys, in the right of the painting, are muscular and solid as statues, in the style taught by David, but the two main figures on the left, Achilles and Patroclus, are mobile, vivid and graceful, like figures in a delicate bas-relief.

His residence in Rome was postponed until 1806 due to a shortage of state funds. In the meantime, he worked in Paris alongside several other students of David in a studio provided by the state, and further developed a style that emphasised purity of contour. He found inspiration in the works of Raphael, in Etruscan vase paintings, and in the outline engravings of the English artist John Flaxman. His drawings of Hermaphrodite and the Nymph Salmacis showed a new stylised ideal of female beauty, which would reappear later in his Jupiter et Thetis and his famous nudes.

In 1802 he made his debut at the Salon with Portrait of a Woman (the current whereabouts of which is unknown). Between 1804 and 1806 he painted a series of portraits which were striking for their extreme precision, particularly in the richness of their fabrics and tiny details. These included the Portrait of Philipbert Riviére (1805), Portrait of Sabine Rivière (1805–06), Portrait of Madame Aymon (also known as La Belle Zélie; 1806), and Portrait of Caroline Rivière (1805–06). The female faces were not at all detailed but were softened, and were notable for their large oval eyes and delicate flesh colours and their rather dreamlike expressions. His portraits typically had simple backgrounds of solid dark or light colour, or of sky. These were the beginning of a series that would make him among the most celebrated portrait artists of the 19th century.

As Ingres waited to depart to Rome, his friend Lorenzo Bartolini introduced him to Italian Renaissance paintings, particularly the works of Bronzino and Pontormo, which Napoleon had brought back from his campaign in Italy and placed in the Louvre. Ingres assimilated their clarity and monumentality into his own portrait style. In the Louvre were also masterpieces of Flemish art, including the Ghent Altarpiece by Jan van Eyck, which the French army had seized during its conquest of Flanders. The precision of Renaissance Flemish art became part of Ingres's style. Ingres's stylistic eclecticism represented a new tendency in art. The Louvre, newly filled with booty seized by Napoleon in his campaigns in Italy and the Low Countries, provided French artists of the early 19th century with an unprecedented opportunity to study, compare, and copy masterworks from antiquity and from the entire history of European painting. As art historian Marjorie Cohn has written: "At the time, art history as a scholarly enquiry was brand-new. Artists and critics outdid each other in their attempts to identify, interpret, and exploit what they were just beginning to perceive as historical stylistic developments." From the beginning of his career, Ingres freely borrowed from earlier art, adopting the historical style appropriate to his subject, and was consequently accused by critics of plundering the past.

Newly arrived in Rome, Ingres read with mounting indignation the relentlessly negative press clippings sent to him from Paris by his friends. In letters to his prospective father-in-law, he expressed his outrage at the critics: "So the Salon is the scene of my disgrace; ... The scoundrels, they waited until I was away to assassinate my reputation ... I have never been so unhappy....I knew I had many enemies; I never was agreeable with them and never will be. My greatest wish would be to fly to the Salon and to confound them with my works, which don't in any way resemble theirs; and the more I advance, the less their work will resemble mine." He vowed never again to exhibit at the Salon, and his refusal to return to Paris led to the breaking up of his engagement. Julie Forestier, when asked years later why she had never married, responded, "When one has had the honor of being engaged to M. Ingres, one does not marry."

On 23 November 1806, he wrote to Jean Forestier, the father of his former fiancée, "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. Many drawings of monuments in Rome from this time are attributed to Ingres, but it appears from more recent scholarship that they were actually the work of his collaborators, particularly his friend the landscape artist François-Marius Granet. As required of every winner of the Prix, he sent works at regular intervals to Paris so his progress could be judged. Traditionally fellows sent paintings of male Greek or Roman heroes, but for his first samples Ingres sent Baigneuse à mi-corps (1807), a painting of the back of a young woman bathing, based on an engraving of an antique vase, and La Grande Bagneuse (1808), a larger painting of the back of a nude bather, and the first Ingres model to wear a turban, a detail he borrowed from the Fornarina by his favourite painter, Raphael. To satisfy the Academy in Paris, he also dispatched Oedipus and the Sphinx to show his mastery of the male nude. The verdict of the academicians in Paris was that the figures were not sufficiently idealized. In later years Ingres painted several variants of these compositions; another nude begun in 1807, the Venus Anadyomene, remained in an unfinished state for decades, to be completed forty years later and finally exhibited in 1855.

During his time in Rome he also painted numerous portraits: Madame Duvaucey (1807), François-Marius Granet (1807), Joseph-Antoine Moltedo (1810), Madame Panckoucke (1811), and Charles-Joseph-Laurent Cordier (1811). In 1812 he painted one of his few portraits of an older woman, Comtesse de Tournon, mother of the prefect of Rome. In 1810 Ingres's pension at the Villa Medici ended, but he decided to stay in Rome and seek patronage from the French occupation government.

In 1811 Ingres completed his final student exercise, the immense Jupiter and Thetis, a scene from the Iliad of Homer: the goddess of the Sea, Thetis, pleads with Zeus to act in favor of her son Achilles. The face of the water nymph Salmacis he had drawn years earlier reappeared as Thetis. Ingres wrote with enthusiasm that he had been planning to paint this subject since 1806, and he intended to "deploy all of the luxury of art in its beauty". However, once again, the critics were hostile, finding fault with the exaggerated proportions of the figures and the painting's flat, airless quality.

Although facing uncertain prospects, in 1813 Ingres married a young woman, Madeleine Chapelle, recommended to him by her friends in Rome. After a courtship carried out through correspondence, he proposed without having met her, and she accepted. Their marriage was happy, and Madame Ingres's faith in her husband was unwavering. After a difficult childbirth in 1815 resulted in a stillborn baby, the couple remained childless. Ingres continued to suffer disparaging reviews, as Don Pedro of Toledo Kissing Henry IV's Sword, Raphael and the Fornarina (Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University), several portraits, and the Interior of the Sistine Chapel met with generally hostile critical response at the Paris Salon of 1814.

After he left the Academy, a few important commissions came to him. The French governor of Rome, General Miollis, a wealthy patron of the arts, asked him to decorate rooms of the Monte Cavallo Palace, a former papal residence, for an expected visit of Napoleon. Ingres painted a large-scale Romulus' Victory Over Acron (1811) for the salon of the Empress and The Dream of Ossian (1813), based on a book of poems that Napoleon admired, for the ceiling of the Emperor's bedroom. General Miollis also commissioned Ingres to paint Virgil reading The Aeneid before Augustus, Livia and Octavia (1812) for his own residence, the villa Aldobrandini. The painting shows the moment when Virgil, reciting his work to the Emperor Augustus, his wife Livia and his sister Octavia, mentions the name of Octavia's dead son, Marcellus, causing Octavia to faint. The interior was precisely depicted, following the archeological finds at Pompeii. As usual, Ingres made several versions of the same scene: a three-figure fragment cut from an abandoned version is in the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium in Brussels, and in 1825 he made a chalk drawing in vertical format as a model for a reproductive engraving made by Pradier in 1832. The General Miollis version was repurchased by Ingres in the 1830s, reworked by assistants under Ingres's direction, and never finished; The Dream of Ossian was likewise repurchased, modified, but left unfinished.

He traveled to Naples in the spring of 1814 to paint Queen Caroline Murat. Joachim Murat, the King of Naples, had earlier purchased the Dormeuse de Naples, a sleeping nude (the original is lost, but several drawings exist, and Ingres later revisited the subject in L'Odalisque à l'esclave). Murat also commissioned two historical paintings, Raphael et la Fornarina and Paolo et Francesca, and what later became one of Ingres's most famous works, La Grande Odalisque, to accompany Dormeuse de Naples. Ingres never received payment, due to the collapse of the Murat regime and execution of Joachim Murat in 1815. With the fall of Napoleon's dynasty, he found himself essentially stranded in Rome without patronage.

He continued to produce masterful portraits, in pencil and oils, of almost photographic precision; but with the departure of the French administration, the painting commissions were rare. During this low point of his career, Ingres augmented his income by drawing pencil portraits of the many wealthy tourists, in particular the English, passing through postwar Rome. For an artist who aspired to a reputation as a history painter, this seemed menial work, and to the visitors who knocked on his door asking, "Is this where the man who draws the little portraits lives?", he would answer with irritation, "No, the man who lives here is a painter!" The portrait drawings he produced in such profusion during this period rank today among his most admired works. He is estimated to have made some five hundred portrait drawings, including portraits of his famous friends. His friends included many musicians including Paganini, and he regularly played the violin with others who shared his enthusiasm for Mozart, Haydn, Gluck, and Beethoven.

He also produced a series of small paintings in what was known as the Troubador style, idealized portrayals of events in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. In 1815 he painted Aretino and Charles V's Ambassador as well as Aretino and Tintoretto, an anecdotal painting whose subject, a painter brandishing a pistol at his critic, may have been especially satisfying to the embattled Ingres. Other paintings in the same style included Henry IV Playing with His Children (1817) and the Death of Leonardo.

In 1816 Ingres produced his only etching, a portrait of the French ambassador to Rome, Monsignor Gabriel Cortois de Pressigny. The only other prints he is known to have executed are two lithographs: The Four Magistrates of Besançon, made as an illustration for Baron Taylor's Voyages pittoresques et romantiques dans l'ancienne France, and a copy of La Grande Odalisque, both in 1825.

The Vow of Louis XIII in the Salon of 1824 finally brought Ingres critical success. Although Stendhal complained about "the sort of material beauty which excludes the idea of divinity", most critics praised the work. The journalist and future Prime Minister and French President Adolphe Thiers celebrated the breakthrough of a new style: "Nothing is better than variety like this, the essential character of the new style." In January 1825 Ingres was awarded the Cross of the Légion d'honneur by Charles X, and in June 1825 he was elected a member of Académie des Beaux-Arts. Lithographs of La Grande Odalisque published in 1826 in two competing versions by Delpech and Sudré 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 1824 Salon also brought forward a counter-current to the neoclassicism of Ingres: Eugène Delacroix exhibited Les Massacres de Scio, in a romantic style sharply contrasting to that of Ingres.

The success of Ingres's painting led in 1826 to a major new commission, The Apotheosis of Homer, a giant canvas which celebrated all the great artists of history, intended to decorate the ceiling of one of the halls of the Museum Charles X at the Louvre. Ingres was unable to finish the work in time for the 1827 Salon, but displayed the painting in grisaille. The 1827 Salon became a confrontation between the neoclassicism of Ingres's Apotheosis and a new manifesto of romanticism by Delacroix, The Death of Sardanapalus. Ingres joined the battle with enthusiasm; he called Delacroix "the apostle of ugliness" and told friends that he recognized "the talent, the honorable character and distinguished spirit" of Delacroix, but that "he has tendencies which I believe are dangerous and which I must push back."

Despite the considerable patronage he enjoyed under the Bourbon government, Ingres welcomed the July Revolution of 1830. That the outcome of the Revolution was not a republic but a constitutional monarchy was satisfactory to the essentially conservative and pacifistic artist, who in a letter to a friend in August 1830 criticized agitators who "still want to soil and disturb the order and happiness of a freedom so gloriously, so divinely won." Ingres's career was little affected, and he continued to receive official commissions and honors under the July Monarchy.

Ingres exhibited in the Salon of 1833, where his portrait of Louis-François Bertin (1832) was a particular success. The public found its realism spellbinding, although some of the critics declared its naturalism vulgar and its colouring drab. In 1834 he finished a large religious painting, The Martyrdom of Saint Symphorian, which depicted the first saint to be martyred in Gaul. The painting was commissioned in 1824 by the Ministry of the Interior for the Cathedral of Autun, and the iconography in the picture was specified by the bishop. Ingres conceived the painting as the summation of all of his work and skill, and worked on it for ten years before displaying it at the Salon of 1834. He was surprised, shocked and angered by the response; the painting was attacked by both the neoclassicists and by the romantics. Ingres was accused of historical inaccuracy, for the colours, and for the feminine appearance of the Saint, who looked like a beautiful statue. In anger, Ingres announced that he would no longer accept public commissions, and that he would no longer participate in the Salon. He later did participate in some semi-public expositions and a retrospective of his work at the 1855 Paris International Exposition, but never again took part in the Salon or submitted his work for public judgement. Instead, at the end of 1834 he returned to Rome to become the Director of the Academy of France.

Ingres remained in Rome for six years. He devoted much of his attention to the training of the painting students, as he was later to do at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. He re-organized the Academy, increased the size of the library, added many molds of classical statues to the Academy collection, and assisted the students in getting public commissions in both Rome and Paris. He traveled to Orvieto (1835), Siena (1835), and to Ravenna and Urbino to study the paleochristian mosaics, medieval murals and Renaissance art. He devoted considerable attention to music, one of the subjects of the academy; he welcomed Franz Liszt and Fanny Mendelssohn. He formed a long friendship with Liszt. Composer Charles Gounod, who was a pensioner at the time at the Academy, described Ingres's appreciation of modern music, including Weber and Berlioz, and his adoration for Beethoven, Haydn, Mozart and Gluck. He joined the music students and his friend Niccolò Paganini in playing Beethoven's violin works. Gounod 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, indicated Stendhal, and told him, "If this gentleman ever calls again, I am not here."

His rancor against the Paris art establishment for his failure at the 1834 Salon did not abate. In 1836 he refused a major commission from the French Minister of the Interior, Adolphe Thiers, to decorate the interior of the Church of the Madeleine in Paris, because the commission had been offered first to a rival, Paul Delaroche, who refused it. He did complete a small number of works which he sent to patrons in Paris. One was L'Odalisque et l'esclave, (1839), a portrait of a blonde odalisque, or member of a harem, who reclines languorously while a turbaned musician plays. This fitted into the popular genre of orientalism; his rival Eugène Delacroix had created a painting on a similar theme, Les Femmes d'Alger, for the 1834 Salon. The setting was inspired by Persian miniatures and was full of exotic detail, but the woman's long reclining form was pure Ingres. The critic Théophile Gautier wrote of Ingres's work: "It is impossible to better paint the mystery, the silence and the suffocating atmosphere of the seraglio." In 1842 he painted a second version, nearly identical to the first but with a landscape background (painted by his student Paul Flandrin).

The second painting he sent, in 1840, was The Illness of Antiochus (1840; also known as Aniochus and Stratonice) a history painting on a theme of love and sacrifice, a theme once painted by David in 1800, when Ingres was in his studio. It was commissioned by the Duc d'Orleans, the son of King Louis Philippe I), and had very elaborate architectural background designed by one of the Academy students, Victor Baltard, the future architect of the Paris market Les Halles. The central figure was an ethereal woman in a pastel robe, whose contemplative pose with her hand on her chin recurs in some of Ingres's female portraits.

His painting of Aniochius and Stratonice, despite its small size, just one meter, was a major success for Ingres. In August it was shown in the private apartment of the duc d'Orléans in the Pavilion Marsan of the Palais des Tuileries. The King greeted him personally at Versailles and gave him a tour of the Palace. He was offered a commission to paint a portrait of the Duke, the heir to the throne, and another from the Duc de Lunyes to create two huge murals for the Château de Dampierre. In April 1841 he returned definitively to Paris.

One of the first works executed after his return to Paris was a portrait of the duc d'Orléans. After the heir to the throne was killed in a carriage accident a few months after the painting was completed in 1842, Ingres received commissions to make additional copies. He also received a commission to design seventeen stained glass windows for the chapel on the place where the accident occurred, and a commission for eight additional stained-glass designs for Orléans chapel in Dreux. He became a professor at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. He took his students frequently to the Louvre to the see the classical and Renaissance art, instructing them to look straight ahead and to avoid the works of Rubens, which he believed deviated too far from the true values of art.

The Revolution of 1848, which overthrew Louis Philippe and created the French Second Republic, had little effect on his work or his ideas. He declared that the revolutionaries were "cannibals who called themselves French", but during the Revolution completed his Venus Anadyomene, which he had started as an academic study in 1808. It represented Venus, rising from the sea which had given birth to her, surrounded by cherubs. He welcomed the patronage of the new government of Louis-Napoleon, who in 1852 became Emperor Napoleon III.

In 1843 Ingres began the decorations of the great hall in the Château de Dampierre with two large murals, the Golden Age and the Iron Age, illustrating the origins of art. He made more than five hundred preparatory drawings, and worked on the enormous project for six years. In an attempt to imitate the effect of Renaissance frescos, he chose to paint the murals in oil on plaster, which created technical difficulties. Work on the Iron Age never progressed beyond the architectural background painted by an assistant. Meanwhile, the growing crowd of nudes in the Golden Age discomfited Ingres's patron, the Duc de Luynes, and Ingres suspended work on the mural in 1847. Ingres was devastated by the loss of his wife, who died on 27 July 1849, and he was finally unable to complete the work. In July 1851, he announced a gift of his artwork to his native city of Montauban, and in October he resigned as professor at the École des Beaux-Arts.

However, in 1852, Ingres, then seventy-one years of age, married forty-three-year-old Delphine Ramel, a relative of his friend Marcotte d'Argenteuil. Ingres was rejuvenated, and in the decade that followed he completed several significant works, including the portrait of Princesse Albert de Broglie, née Joséphine-Eléonore-Marie-Pauline de Galard de Brassac de Béarn. In 1853 he began the Apotheosis of Napoleon I, for the ceiling of a hall in the Hôtel de Ville, Paris. (It was destroyed in May 1871 when the Paris Commune set fire to the building.) With the help of assistants, in 1854 he completed another history painting, Joan of Arc at the Coronation of Charles VII. A retrospective of his works was featured at the Paris Universal Exposition of 1855, and in the same year Napoleon III named him a Grand Officer of the Légion d'honneur. In 1862 he was awarded the title of Senator, and made a member of the Imperial Council on Public Instruction. Three of his works were shown in the London International Exhibition, and his reputation as a major French painter was confirmed once more.

He continued to rework and refine his classic themes. In 1856 Ingres completed The Source (The Spring), a painting begun in 1820 and closely related to his Venus Anadyoméne. He painted two versions of Louis XIV and Molière (1857 and 1860), and produced variant copies of several of his earlier compositions. These included religious works in which the figure of the Virgin from The Vow of Louis XIII was reprised: The Virgin of the Adoption of 1858 (painted for Mademoiselle Roland-Gosselin) was followed by The Virgin Crowned (painted for Madame la Baronne de Larinthie) and The Virgin with Child. In 1859 he produced new versions of The Virgin of the Host, and in 1862 he completed Christ and the Doctors, a work commissioned many years before by Queen Marie Amalie for the chapel of Bizy. He painted small replicas of Paolo and Francesca and Oedipus and the Sphinx. In 1862 he completed a small oil-on-paper version of The Golden Age. The last of his important portrait paintings date from this period: Marie-Clothilde-Inés de Foucauld, Madame Moitessier, Seated (1856), Self-Portrait at the Age of Seventy-eight and Madame J.-A.-D. Ingres, née Delphine Ramel, both completed in 1859. At the request of the Uffizi Gallery of Florence, he made his own-self portrait in 1858. The only colour in the painting is the red of his rosette of the Legion of Honour.