647. Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780-1867),

French, Self-Portrait at the Age of Twenty-Four, 1804.

Oil on canvas, 78 x 61 cm. Musée Condé,

Chantilly. Neoclassicism.

 

 

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres

(1780 Montauban – 1867 Paris)

 

Ingres at first seemed destined to continue the brilliant work of his master Jacques-Louis David both in portrait and historical painting. He won the Prix de Rome in 1801. Ingres, however, soon emancipated himself. He was only twenty-five when he painted the Rivière portraits. These show an original talent and a taste for composition not without some mannerism, but the mannerism is full of charm, and the refinement of undulating lines is as far removed as possible from the simple and slightly rough realism which is the strength of David’s portraits. His contemporary rivals were not deceived. They attacked his “archaic” and “singular” taste and dubbed him “Gothic” and “Chinese”. During the Salon of 1824 however, back from Italy, Ingres was promoted to leader of the Academic style in opposition to the new Romanticism led by Delacroix.

In 1834, he was appointed director of the French School in Rome, where he stayed for seven years. Then after his return he was again acclaimed as master of traditional values and finished his days in his hometown in southern France. The biggest contradiction in Ingres’ career is his title of Guardian of the Classical Rules and Precepts, although we still perceive eccentricity in some of the most beautiful of his works. A pedant, seeing the back of La Grande Odalisque and various exaggerations of form in The Turkish Bath would point to this incomparable draughtsman’s faults. But are these not the means by which a great and extremely sensitive artist interprets his passion for the beautiful female form? When he wanted to group a large number of people in a monumental work such as L’Apothéose d’Homère, Ingres never attained the ease, the suppleness, the life, or the unity which we admire in the magnificent decorative compositions of Delacroix. On the other hand, he had an impeccable sureness, original taste, a fertile and appropriate invention in the pictures where only two or three figures appear, and even more in those where he illustrates, standing or reclining, a single effigy of the female figure, which was the enchantment and sweet torment of his whole life.