The standard-bearer of French Neoclassical painting for half a century: master of the drawn line, painter of the Grande Odalisque and the Turkish Bath, portraitist of the French bourgeoisie, and Delacroix's great opposite.
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres stood for one side of the great argument in French painting. Colour and passion belonged to Eugène Delacroix; drawing and line belonged to Ingres. Born in Montauban in 1780 and trained in Jacques-Louis David's studio, he carried the classical tradition deep into the nineteenth century. He defended it with the stubbornness of a man who believed he was defending civilization.
The paradox is that this arch-conservative painted some of the strangest bodies in French art. The Grande Odalisque's back is famously too long; the portraits bend arms and necks for the sake of a curve. What his era read as error, the moderns read as licence — Degas, Picasso and Matisse all drew on him — and the Turkish Bath, finished when he was eighty-two, remains one of painting's most audacious late works.
Ingres was born in Montauban, in the south-west of France, on 29 August 1780. His father, a decorative sculptor and jack-of-all-trades artist, trained him early in drawing and music; the boy studied at the academy in Toulouse and played violin professionally in the Toulouse opera orchestra as a teenager. In 1797 he moved to Paris and entered the studio of Jacques-Louis David, the most powerful painter in Europe.
He won the Prix de Rome in 1801, though the state's empty purse delayed the journey to Italy until 1806. By then he had already developed the convictions he never abandoned: that drawing is the probity of art, that Raphael was painting's summit, and that colour should serve the line.
Ingres stayed in Italy for eighteen years, first in Rome and from 1820 in Florence, supporting himself with portrait drawings of tourists while his Salon submissions were mocked in Paris. The Grande Odalisque, painted in 1814 for Caroline Murat, Queen of Naples, was ridiculed at the Salon of 1819 for its impossibly long back.
The years of rejection produced much of what is now most admired: the cool erotic nudes, the pencil portraits whose line seems engraved, and a personal Orient of turbans, hammams and odalisques. That Orient was invented entirely from the studio; Ingres never travelled east.
The tide turned in 1824, when The Vow of Louis XIII, shown at the Salon, made him the official champion of classicism at the very moment Eugène Delacroix was unveiling the Massacres at Chios across the same exhibition. For the next generation French painting organized itself around that opposition: Ingres against Delacroix, line against colour, finish against fire.
Honours followed: membership of the Institut, a professorship at the École des Beaux-Arts. So did the portrait that fixed the face of the July Monarchy bourgeoisie — Monsieur Bertin (1832), the press magnate seated with hands planted on his knees like a lion about to stand.
Stung by criticism of his Martyrdom of Saint Symphorian, Ingres left Paris to direct the French Academy in Rome from 1835 to 1840, an exacting and reforming director. Back in Paris he ruled as the establishment's great old man, painting society portraits — the Comtesse d'Haussonville, the Princesse de Broglie — whose satins and mirrors are still the era's definitive glamour.
He kept working to the end. The Turkish Bath, the circular crowd of bathers that compresses a lifetime of odalisques into one canvas, was finished in 1862, when he was eighty-two. He died in Paris on 14 January 1867; his studio contents and collection went to his birthplace, where the Musée Ingres in Montauban holds thousands of his drawings.
Ingres played the violin all his life — well enough to have earned his seat in the Toulouse orchestra as a young man, and devotedly enough that French gained an idiom from it. Un violon d'Ingres means a serious hobby pursued beside one's real work: the second art of a man who insisted painting came first.
Born in Montauban on 29 August, son of a decorative sculptor.
Moves to Paris and enters Jacques-Louis David's studio.
Wins the Prix de Rome; the state's finances delay his departure for Italy until 1806.
Paints the Grande Odalisque in Rome for Caroline Murat, Queen of Naples.
The Grande Odalisque is mocked at the Paris Salon for its anatomy.
The Vow of Louis XIII triumphs at the Salon; Ingres becomes the standard-bearer of classicism against Eugène Delacroix.
Paints Monsieur Bertin, the defining portrait of the July Monarchy press and its power.
Begins five years as director of the French Academy in Rome.
Finishes the Turkish Bath at eighty-two.
Dies in Paris on 14 January; his drawings and collection go to Montauban, now the Musée Ingres.
Painting · Neoclassicism turning toward Romanticism
Ingres's reclining nude of 1814, painted for Caroline Murat, Queen of Naples, and now in the Louvre. Its impossibly long back, mocked at the Salon of 1819, became one of the most argued-over anatomies in art.
Degas revered Ingres above all masters, collected his work, and repeated the advice the old painter gave him as a young man: to draw lines, many lines, from memory and from nature. Ingres's line runs through Degas's draughtsmanship for the rest of the century.
For leading French Neoclassical painting through the middle of the nineteenth century, as the great defender of drawing and line against Delacroix and Romantic colour. His famous canvases include the Grande Odalisque (1814), the portrait of Monsieur Bertin (1832), the society portraits of the 1840s and 1850s, and the Turkish Bath (1862).
The defining argument of French painting from the 1820s onward. Ingres stood for classical line, finish and Raphael; Eugène Delacroix for colour, movement and passion. The Salon of 1824, where Ingres's Vow of Louis XIII hung while Delacroix showed the Massacres at Chios, set the two camps, and critics kept score for decades.
By design. He stretched spines, bent necks and boned arms to make the figure's contour one continuous curve — the Grande Odalisque's famous too-long back is the clearest case. Contemporaries read it as error; later painters, from Degas to Picasso and Matisse, read it as the licence to put design above anatomy.
No. The odalisques, turbans and baths were built in the studio from prints, props and other pictures. His Orient is a French fantasy, painted over a career in Paris, Rome and Florence, and it documents that fantasy as much as it documents any real place.
A serious hobby beside one's main work. Ingres was a lifelong violinist — he had played professionally in Toulouse as a teenager — and his devotion to the instrument became the French idiom for a cherished second pursuit.
The Louvre in Paris holds the core: the Grande Odalisque, Monsieur Bertin, The Vow of Louis XIII and the Turkish Bath. The Musée Ingres in his native Montauban keeps his studio contents and thousands of drawings; the Frick in New York and the National Gallery in London hold major portraits.
Influenced
Degas revered Ingres above all masters, collected his work, and repeated the advice the old painter gave him as a young man: to draw lines, many lines, from memory and from nature. Ingres's line runs through Degas's draughtsmanship for the rest of the century.
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