INGRES, Jean-Auguste-Dominique

Of the known versions of Don Pedro of Toledo Kissing the Sword of Henri IV, the present picture is the most striking, due primarily to the dramatic perspective of the Salle des Caryatides. Although this painting was signed and dated Rome 1820, Ingres had originally entered it in the 1814 Salon, but then reworked it, finally completing the painting in 1822.

The tiny drawing represents Count Otto Magnus Baron von Stackelberg, one of the first archaeologists, and also a writer, painter and art historian, born in Tallinn (on the right), and probably Jakob Linckh, a German painter and archaeologist. Both young men were at the age of 31 at the time Ingres had sketched them.

The painter Fran�ois-Marius Granet enjoyed great success for his historical and interior scenes. In this painting he himself is the subject of one of the most intensely Romantic of all artist’s portraits, painted by his friend Ingres.

Charles VII (1403-1461) was a monarch of the House of Valois who ruled as King of France from 1422 to his death. In 1422, Charles VII inherited the throne of France under desperate circumstances. Forces of the Kingdom of England and the Duchy of Burgundy occupied Guyenne and northern France, including Paris, the most populous city, and Reims, the city in which the French kings were traditionally crowned. His political and military position improved dramatically with the emergence of Joan of Arc as a spiritual leader in France. Joan and other charismatic military leaders led French troops to several important victories that paved the way for the coronation of Charles VII in 1429 at Reims Cathedral.

It is often said that while Delacroix was the great proponent of French Romanticism, his older contemporary Ingres was the champion of the classical tradition: obsessed with Raphael and antiquity, upholder of ‘drawing’ versus ‘colour’. Real life being less tidy, however, we find that Delacroix was a more calculating artist than the hyper-emotional Ingres, who did not hesitate to break academic rules for expressive ends. Both painted subjects from literature and history, and his response to the female nude is as charged with erotic longing and scarcely sublimated violence as Delacroix’s. Nor did Ingres invariably emulate Raphael and Poussin. Throughout his long career he tried to match style to subject, looking in turn to Greek vase painting, to the Early Renaissance, even to the Dutch seventeenth-century painters of everyday life.

It is, however, true that drawing was of primary importance to him. Forced to support himself and his wife in Rome in 1814 by drawing the English tourists who flocked back to the city liberated from French rule, he developed a wonderfully spare, yet lively and descriptive line. Although he despised portraiture as a lower form of art, like his teacher David Ingres came to excel in it. Few of his painted portraits are more sumptuous than Madame Moitessier, begun in 1847 but completed only in 1856 when the artist, as he tells us in his signature, was 76.

He had originally refused to paint this wealthy banker’s wife, but when he met her he was so captivated by her beauty that he agreed, asking her to bring her small daughter, ‘la charmante Catherine’, whose head is visible under her mother’s arm in a preparatory drawing in the Ingres Museum in Montauban. The doubtless bored and wriggling child was soon banished as Ingres wrestled with the picture, requiring long hours of immobility from his model. The sitter’s dress was changed more than once. Ingres is recorded as still working on the portrait in 1847. The death of his wife in 1849 left him in despair and unable to paint for many months. In 1851 he began sittings anew and completed a standing likeness of In�s Moitessier in black (now in Washington). He returned to the seated version in 1852.

When he had finished four years later the sitter was 35. Ageless like a goddess with her Grecian profile impossibly reflected in a mirror parallel to the back of her head but dressed with Second Empire opulence in flowered chintz, Madame Moitessier exemplifies the ambiguities of Ingres’s art. The firm contour of her shoulders, arms and face defines flesh perfectly rounded - though barely modelled - and as poreless, smooth and luminous as polished alabaster, yet paradoxically soft to the touch. In contrast to the resiliently buxom horsehair settee, it arouses fantasies and fears of bruising. The pose, with head resting against the right forefinger, derives from an ancient wall painting and signifies as Ingres must have known matronly modesty. But ‘classicising’ devices are offset by the minutely realistic transcription of the surfaces of fabrics, the fashionable parure of jewels, ormolu frames, Oriental porcelain. The mixture of the general with the particular, timeless grandeur with bourgeois ostentation, languor with pictorial rigour, is unique to Ingres and far from bloodlessly Neo-classical.

The portrait of Madame Rivi�re, n�e Marie Fran�oise Jacquette Bibiane Blot de Beauregard (¹⁷⁷³⁄₇₄ - 1848) was exhibited at the Salon of 1806, together with the portraits of Monsieur Rivi�re and their daughter. These portraits show the influence of Raphael and other Florentine painters.

The painting was exhibited at the Salon of 1806.

In portrait painting Ingres surpassed all his contemporaries. He could combine realistic exactitude with psychological insight, but still remain the sober observer, not involved in the inner life of his subjects. He could paint old men with the same supreme ease as young princesses, and capture the critical eyes of fellow painters as exactly as the dignity of political office, as in the portrait of Louis-Fran�ois Bertin (1766-1841), one of the leading personalities between the July monarchy and the Second Empire. He established the Journal des D�bats which supported the policy of Louis-Philippe.

As a portrait painter, Ingres has often been compared to Holbein, and in portraiture particularly the severity of line and exactitude of detail so typical of Neoclassicism often lend the subject a touch of special historical dignity.

The portrait of Philibert Rivi�re (1766-1816) was exhibited at the Salon of 1806.

According to the classic myth, as rendered in Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, Oedipus came to the Sphynx, who blocked the road to Thebes and challenged every traveler to answer a riddle or die. Oedipus mastered the riddle and the Sphynx jumped to her death in mortification.

Ingres first painted this composition in 1808, then changed it before presenting it at the Salon of 1827.

The influence of German artists on Ingres should be mentioned. While in Italy he became familiar with the paintings of German painters (Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld, Friedrich Overbeck, Peter Cornelius and others). Many of Ingres’ paintings reflect these encounters such as the Paolo and Francesca.

In this portrait of a Russian diplomat, Ingres does not idealize his subject but uses him as a pretext for the expression of his own conception of the ideal. Despite being a cold combination of classical clich�s, the work remains a model of perfection in line and composition. Such a dramatic colour range is rare for Ingres and is reminiscent of portraits by Florentine Mannerists, one of the greatest impression the artist gained from Italy.

An affection for this model (probably a relative of Lucien Bonaparte, Napoleon’s brother) imbues the artist’s line with a natural suppleness and precision. Without striving after psychological insight, Ingres brings out the mix of stiffness and femininity behind his subject’s cool gaze.

Ingres was Jacques-Louis David’s most celebrated pupil. His severe classical style and his meticulous working procedure epitomized the academic tradition, which he defended vehemently against the French Romantic movement, led by Eug�ne Delacroix. As a young man, he supported himself almost exclusively with commissioned portraits, but later in his life he hoped to renounce them for “grander things.” Nevertheless, the last series of aristocratic portraits he made, between 1845 and 1853, were among the greatest achievements of his maturity.

The princesse de Broglie (1825-1860) was a great beauty and a highly respected woman, the embodiment of the best of the Second Empire aristocracy. Ingres began her portrait in 1851; after accepting the commission he wrote to a friend that it would be his last except for that of his wife. The painting completes his series of aristocratic portraits and is a supreme example of the mastery of technique, the bold use of colour, and the understanding of female character for which Ingres is so justly celebrated.

Angelica is the daughter of a king of Cathay in Orlando Furioso, by the Italian poet Ariosto (1474-1533), a romantic epic poem about the conflict between Christians and Saracens at the time of Charlemagne. Angelica was loved by several knights, Christian and pagan, among them the Christian hero Orlando (Roland). He was maddened (furioso) with grief and jealousy because she became the lover of, and eventually married, the Moor Modero. Roger (Ruggiero) freeing Angelica is a theme very like Perseus and Andromeda. Angelica chained to a rock by the seashore is about to be attacked by a sea-monster, the orc. Roger, one of the pagan champions, arrives riding on a hippogriff (a monster, the creation of the poets of the late middle ages). He dazzles the monster with his magic shield, and places a magic ring on Angelica’s finger to protect her. He undoes her bonds and they ride off together.

Ingres developed a highly sensitive aestheticism, particularly in depicting the beautiful naked body. He excelled his teachers in this, and it was here that he sought an ideal of form that goes to the limits of what can be done in painting. It is hard to find an equal anywhere in the history of art turned to us by The Grand Odalisque or the body of the young girl in Roger Freeing Angelica, modeled in soft lines.

The position of the young Angelica, with her head tilted back, is highly exaggerated by modern standards, but the exposed and defenseless neck and the eyes cast up to suggest that she has fainted are intended to signalise pure feminine submission. In order to portray this unconditional surrender to her rescuer, Ingres has almost made her look as if she has a goitre. But this calculated submission to the aesthetic of the nude makes it no less erotic precisely because the very evidence of a weak spot in her beauty makes her seem less remote from the viewer.

Ingres attempted in 1827 a historical synopsis in his great composition, the Apotheosis of Homer. This canvas was originally a ceiling decoration in the Salle Clarac in the Louvre.

The most famous artists in history are depicted here: Dante and Moli�re and painters such as Poussin, but Homer reigns above them all. This assembly of great artists and writers of all ages gathered to honour the ancient Greek poet before a classical temple might look the epitome of hierarchical academicism. The painting was intended as the sum of all aesthetic rules. However, it could hardly live up to the expectations. Today it seems stiff and unnatural.

The painting’s formal composition and pale, sugary colours appear at the opposite extreme to Delacroix’s Sardanapalus, shown in the same Salon. Delacroix’s picture seems far away from academic orthodoxy, while Ingres’s Homer looks like its ultimate endorsement.

Ossian purports to be a translation of an epic cycle of Scottish poems from the early dark ages. Ossian, a blind bard, sings of the life and battles of Fingal, a Scotch warrior. Ossian caused a sensation when it was published on the cusp of the era of revolutions, and had a massive cultural impact during the 18th and 19th centuries. Napoleon carried a copy into battle; Goethe translated parts of it; the city of Selma, Alabama was named after the home of Fingal, and one of Ingres’ most romantic and moody paintings, the Dream of Ossian was based on it. The originator of the “unearthed, old Irish fragments” Fingal and Temora, published in 1762 and 1763, was a Scot, James Macpherson (1736-1796). Ten years after Macpherson’s death it was discovered that the poems were forgeries, written by Macpherson himself from fragments of sagas.

In 1812 Ingres was commissioned to paint the subject of Ossian for the ceiling of one of the rooms used by Napoleon in the Quirinal Palace in Rome. Three years after Napoleon left, the Pope gave the painting back to the artist, understandably, for the heathen visions were hardly suitable for the Catholic ambience.

Ingres handled the theme with monumental simplicity. The dream figures are like transparent alabaster sculptures, they look exhausted, lying almost lifeless, as if they themselves are dreaming the dream. The work has a timeless, dreamlike quality.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 4 minutes):

Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy: The Hebrides Overture (‘Fingals Cave’)

The influence of German artists on Ingres should be mentioned. While in Italy he became familiar with the paintings of German painters (Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld, Friedrich Overbeck, Peter Cornelius and others). Many of Ingres’ paintings reflect these encounters, particularly The Entry of the Future Charles V into Paris in 1358.

This piece of blatant Bourbon propaganda was created for the pro-Bourbon comte Amed�e-David de Pastoret - of whom Ingres was to paint a splendid portrait for the Salon of 1827 - and shows his ancestor, Jean Pastourel, a fourteenth-century president of the Paris parliament, greeting the future king at the city gates after he had survived a peasants’ insurrection in 1358. The subject, taken from the fourteenth-century chronicles of Jean Froissart, was matched in an appropriately archaic style.

The effects in Ingres’ paintings largely depend on drawing and linearity, but he also used colour to supremely calculated effect. The cold turquoise of the silk curtain with its decoration of red flowers intensified the warm flesh tone of the Grande Odalisque. This nude was painted in 1814 for Napoleon’s sister, Queen Caroline Murat. Unlike the realism of Goya’s Maja, Ingres’ nude is hardly intimate, the eroticism here emerging slowly from the reserve and the questioning, assessing glance of the naked woman. This is a tradition that goes back to Giorgione and Titian, but Ingres has painted a living woman and not an allegory of Venus. Nevertheless, the realistic intimacy is lessened by setting the scene in the distant world of the Orient.

For many in the West, the idea of the harem with its available or exploited women trapped in their own closed world was as much proof of the fallen or primitive state of the East as was its supposed savagery. But it was also infinitely titillating. Ingres’s picture is more than this, however. A sense of loss was inevitably embodied in French perceptions of the East after their defeat in Egypt, and it was perhaps because it sublimated unattainable desires that the theme of the Oriental nude, bather or harem girl gained such a haunting appeal. Ingres is remarkable for combining a frank allure with a chilling perfection of flesh. He had picked up his discreet hints of the harem — a turban here, a fan there — from Oriental artefacts and miniatures in the collections of Gros and Denon. They serve to locate his nude, who otherwise could really belong anywhere, in a sensuous Orient of the imagination.

Ingres began this painting in Florence in 1820 but finished it much later in Paris with the assistants Alexandre Legoffe and Jean Paul Etienne Balze.

In the staircase of the Louvre, Don Pedro de Toledo, the Spanish Ambassador, kisses the sword of Henri IV. This is a later version of three other variants of this subject.

Ingres derived the idea of these swarming nudes in the interior of a harem from Lady Mary Wortley Montague’s letters (No. XXVI and XLII). She was the wife of the English ambassador to the Sublime Porte; in these two letters she describes baths in the Seraglio, which she was allowed to enter, and Ingres copied extracts from them into his notebook (No. IX), probably in about 1817.

Several of the figures in this canvas have been taken from earlier pictures; others are new. Ingres had not a very ready imagination, and borrowed from both French and English prints of ‘turqueries’, going back to the eighteenth or even the sixteenth centuries. Copies of these are still to be seen in the archives of his studio in the Mus�e de Montauban.

This picture has existed in at least two forms. A first sketch, intended for Comte Demidoff, was executed in 1852, but not delivered; it was probably worked on again after this date, and at the end of 1859 it was bought by Prince Napoleon. The appearance of this picture, which at that time was square, is known from a photograph dated 7 October 1859. On the intervention of Princess Clotilde, scandalized by all those nudes, the Prince returned it to Ingres; M. Reiset was entrusted with negotiating its exchange for a portrait of the artist at the age of twenty-four (now in the Mus�e Cond�, Chantilly). Ingres kept the picture for several years, making various changes in it and giving it its final circular form. He signed it in 1862, indicating with pride that it was the work of a man of eighty-two.

The painting is known as the Valpin�on Bather, after one of the former owners. It is the first of a series of female nudes painted by Ingres.

Ingres was a life-long proponent of the primacy of line over colour. His service to art lay in his abilities as a portraitist and as one of the most important draughtsmen of the century. His portrait drawings are remarkable for their psychological empathy and the enormous subtlety with which light and surface area are treated.

Ingres, himself a talented violinist, drew a portrait of Niccolò Paganini - at that stage at the very beginning of his career - probably as a reminder of concerts the two friends had performed together.

Listen to an example of Paganini’s music.

Ingres continued to paint in the Neoclassical style throughout his career, although the style came under attack from younger contemporaries like G�ricault or Delacroix. The Vow of Louis XIII is a kind of neoclassical votive painting. In it Ingres adapted whole passages of Raphael’s Madonna di Foligno, but he also borrowed forms that were developed by the Carraccis.