Ingres, Jean-Auguste-Dominique
Ingres, Jean-Auguste-Dominique
Ingres, Jean-Auguste-Dominique (1780-1867). French painter,
born at Montauban, the son of a minor painter and sculptor, Jean-Marie-Joseph
Ingres (1755-1814).
The
Riviere
After
an early academic training in the Toulouse academy he went to Paris in 1796 and
was a fellow student of Gros in David's studio. He won the Prix de Rome in 1801,
but owing to the state of France's economy he was not awarded the usual stay in
Rome until 1807. In the interval he produced his first portraits. These fall
into two catagories: portraits of himself and his friends, conceived in a
Romantic spirit (Gilibert, Musйe Ingres, Montauban, 1805), and
portraits of well-to-do clients which are characterized by purity of line and
enamel-like coloring (Mlle Riviиre, Louvre, Paris, 1805). These
early portraits are notable for their calligraphic line and expressive contour,
which had a sensuous beauty of its own beyond its function to contain and
delineate form. It was a feature that formed the essential basis of Ingres's
painting throughout his life.
During
his first years in Rome he continued to execute portraits and began to paint
bathers, a theme which was to become one of his favorites (The Valpinзon
Bather, Louvre, Paris, 1808). He remained in Rome when his four-year
scholarship ended, earning his living principally by pencil portraits of
members of the French colony. But he also received more substantial
commissions, including two decorative paintings for Napoleon's palace in Rome (Triumph
of Romulus over Acron, Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Paris, 1812; and Ossian's
Dream, Musйe Ingres, 1813). In 1820 he moved from Rome to Florence,
where he remained for 4 years, working mainly on his Raphaelesque Vow of
Louis XIII, commissioned for the cathedral of Montauban. Ingres's work
had often been severely criticized in Paris because of its `Gothic'
distortions, and when he accompanied this painting to the Salon of 1824 he was
surprised to find it acclaimed and himself set up as the leader of the academic
opposition to the new Romanticism. (Delacroix's Massacre of Chios
was shown at the same Salon.)
Ingres
stayed in Paris for the next ten years and received the official success and
honors he had always craved. During this period he devoted much of his time to
executing two large works: The Apotheosis of Homer, for a ceiling
in the Louvre (installed 1827), and The Martyrdom of St Symphorian
(Salon, 1834) for the cathedral of Autun. When the latter painting was badly
received, however, he accepted the Directorship of the French School in Rome, a
post he retained for 7 years. He was a model administrator and teacher, greatly
improving the school's facilities, but he produced few major works in this
period. In 1841 he returned to France, once again acclaimed as the champion of
traditional values. He was heartbroken when his wife died in 1849, but he made
a successful second marriage in 1852, and he continued working with great
energy into his 80s. One of his acknowledged masterpieces, the extraordinarily
sensuous Turkish Bath (Louvre, 1863), dates from the last years of
his life. At his death he left a huge bequest of his work (several paintings
and more than 4,000 drawings) to his home town of Montauban and they are now in
the museum bearing his name there.
Ingres
is a puzzling artist and his career is full of contradictions. Yet more than
most artists he was obsessed by a restricted number of themes and returned to
the same subject again and again over a long period of years. He was a
bourgeois with the limitations of a bourgeois mentality, but as Baudelaire
remarked, his finest works `are the product of a deeply sensuous nature'. The central
contradiction of his career is that although he was held up as the guardian of
Classical rules and precepts, it is his personal obsessions and mannerisms that
make him such a great artist. His technique as a painter was academically
unimpeachable--he said paint should be as smooth `as the skin of an onion'--but
he was often attacked for the expressive distortions of his draughtsmanship;
critics said, for example, that the abnormally long back of La Grande
Odalisque (Louvre, 1814) had three extra vertebrae. Unfortunately the
influence of Ingres was mainly seen in those shortcomings and weaknesses which
have come to be regarded as the hallmark of inferior academic work. He had
scores of pupils, but Chassйriau was the only one to attain distinction. As a
great calligraphic genius his true successors are Degas and Picasso.
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