Painting. World artists. Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres
(1780-1867)
 Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres remained faithful to
Neo-classic ideals to the end of his life, he formed the
centre of the conservative group that utilised the
Principles of Neo-classicism, forged in the Revolution
(1789-1799) as a weapon for reaction. Ingres was an
infant prodigy, attending art school at eleven, and a
capable performer on the violin. He entered the studio
of David at seventeen, but as long as he lived he never
accepted the cubic mass of David's mature style
preferring curving forms flowing like violin melody.
Winner of the Grand Prix de Rome, he remained in that
city from 1806 until 1820, and returned there from 1835
to 1841, absorbing not only ancient but also Renaissance
art, especially that of Raphael. Ingres stayed four
years in Florence (1820-24) where he was one of the
first to appreciate the Florentine Mannerists. The first
pictures he exhibited at the Salon were almost uniformly
ridiculed, accused of being everything from Gothic to
Chinese, and his special non-political Neo-classicism
was worked out in isolation.
In 1808 Ingres did one of his finest paintings, whose
pose he revived again and again in later works, the
Valpincon Bather, named after the collection it first
adorned. This lovely nude is drawn with a subtle contour
line delicately flowing over shoulders, back and legs.
The surface is modelled to porcelain smoothness, but is
never hard; Ingres was always at his best with delicate
flesh and soft fabrics.
Ingres fancied himself a history painter, although his
narrative pictures are weakened by his inability to
project a dramatic situation. A work that embodies his
ideal programme of Neo-classicism is the huge Apotheosis
of Homer, painted in 1827 and intended for the ceiling
of a room of the Louvre. Ingres made no concessions to
the principles of illusionistic ceiling perspective from
below. He preferred the High Renaissance tradition, as
exemplified by Michelangelo. Before an Ionic temple
dedicated to Homer, the blind poet is enthroned, crowned
with laurel by the muse of epic poetry. Below him sit
two women figures, the one with a sword, representing
the Iliad, another with a rudder the Odyssey. The
geniuses from antiquity and later times whom Ingres
considered truly Classical are grouped around. At the
lower right are grouped three French Classical writers.
Shakespeare and Corneille make the scene in the lower
left-hand corner. The cool light of an ideal realm binds
the figures together in the kind of artificial
composition that became definitive for muralists even
into the twentieth century.
Ingres was financially obliged to accept portrait
commissions, which he considered a waste of time,
although today his portraits are accepted as his
greatest works. He even drew portraits of visitors to
Rome, who trooped to his studio. Such pencil studies as
the Stamaty Family of 1818, show the exquisite quality
of his line.
Ingres's paintings are perfect in colour. All the beauty
of his colour and the perfection of his form are seen in
the portrait of Comtesse d'Houssonville, painted in
1845. She is posed in a corner of her salon, in an
attitude clearly derived from Classical art. No Dutch
painter ever produced still lifes more convincing than
the vases on the mantle. The reflection in the mirror,
going back through Velazquez to van Eyck, reappears
again and again in the nineteenth-century art, deeply
concerned as it was with the optical phenomena.
Although many of his subjects are drawn from the
medieval history and poetry, dear to the Romanticists,
Ingres was resolutely opposed to their abandonment to
emotion and to the artistic sources on which they drew.
Yet, the influence of Ingres later in the nineteenth
century was very great.
Literature: Book "Western European
art" A.P. Minyar-Belorucheva |
