Ingres

According to one of Ingres’ closest followers: “He was already skilled in the handling of the brush when David took on the task of teaching him.” Although it has frequently been said that Ingres only studied with David, the reality is more complex. His father, a painter of provincial fame but enormous ambition, had already initiated him in the fundamentals of the technique – by the age of ten Ingres could paint and draw like a professional – and was planning his future. He thus accompanied his son to Toulouse where, at the height of the Revolutionary period, the local Academy furthered the abilities Ingres had possessed since childhood. There he acquired a solid training with a focus on antiquity, revealing a precocious and refined sensitivity in which the art of Raphael was preeminent. Having graduated in 1797, his arrival in Paris that same year revealed the extent of his ambitions. He enrolled as a pupil of David and as a student at the École des Beaux-Arts, where he studied “with more persistence and perseverance than most of his fellow pupils” in order to avoid “all the seething madness taking place around him.” He also made use of the short-lived Musée Napoléon, which housed the finest paintings looted from countries occupied by the French during the Napoleonic period, and took part in the aesthetic debates in his master’s atelier. Ingres’ goal was, however, the Grand Prix de Rome, the highest recognition that France awarded its young artists.

Ingres was a successful portraitist against his own volition. From the outset of his career he accepted commissions for portraits, although claiming to do so reluctantly: “He’s always the same. He always wants to do everything and he always complains about what he’s accepted when he gets down to painting it”, as one of his closest confidants ironically observed. The need to conform to the established hierarchy of the pictorial genres meant that Ingres attempted to postpone his activities as a commissioned portraitist in order to achieve the desired prestige as a history painter. Nonetheless, from his first efforts in Paris, the genre revealed itself as one of the pillars of his art and as the ideal vehicle for presenting his aesthetic ideas. While waiting to receive the prize money for the Grand Prix de Rome of 1801 (which did not arrive until 1806), Ingres needed to both make a living and further his reputation in society. He thus started to become known as a portraitist, albeit of a somewhat controversial nature. His portraits of this period reflect the voluptuousness of Italian models, the colouring of Flemish art and subtle Gothicising influences which reveal his complete assimilation of models derived from the tradition of painting represented in Napoléon’s Louvre. These portraits are also the best indication of the independent course that his art would take during his years in Rome.

Ingres arrived in Rome as a grant student in 1806. He remained to some extent aloof from the intense atmosphere of collaboration characteristic of the lives of the majority of artists there, preferring to concentrate on his own pictorial investigations. Paradoxically, this deliberate isolation resulted in a more open approach but above all in a rigorous focus on his artistic ideals, defined by his study of the classical tradition and by his passionate admiration for Raphael.

The end of his study grant in 1810 coincided with the establishment of Rome as the second capital of the French empire, allowing Ingres to prolong his stay in order to work for Napoleon and the senior government officials who required his services, before leaving for Florence in 1820. The refined tastes of these clients offered Ingres a unique opportunity to experiment with new aesthetic approaches in his ongoing quest for classical Roman monumentality.

Giving form to the classical tradition was one of the ongoing features of Ingres’ output. In this sense, his interest in Greco-Latin literature played a key role as it allowed him to combine the classicising intent of his aesthetic with the eternal nature of the great themes of antiquity.

In Rome, Ingres painted a composition on Virgil that depicts the culminating moment of the Latin poet’s fame: the moment when he read out his masterpiece, the Aeneid, before the Emperor. The painting was displayed as a pair in the Villa Aldobrandini, the residence of the Napoleonic governor in Rome, with a Coronation of Homer (now lost) by the Spanish artist José Aparicio.

Having returned to Paris, in 1826 Ingres devised a composition for the ceiling of one of the new galleries in the Musée du Louvre. Depicting his own version of The Coronation of Homer, it marks the fulfilment of his desire to root his aesthetic in literary idealism. His depiction of Homer, crowned in the presence of the great myths of classically derived western culture, offers the defining image of classicism.

At a very early date and before he became a celebrated artist, Ingres benefited from the support of a Spanish patron, Carlos Miguel Fitz-James Stuart (1794-1835), 7th Duke of Berwick, who succeeded his cousin (Goya’s famous Duchess of Alba) to the Alba title. With the aim of adding greater lustre to his dynasty, the Duke assembled a remarkable art collection ranging from Roman statuary and classical ceramics to commissions from living artists for painting and sculpture.

Ingres worked for the Duke after the Napoleonic court left Rome, receiving numerous commissions from him, of which he only completed one: Philip V awarding the Golden Fleece to the Duke of Berwick (Madrid, Fundación Casa de Alba). In contrast to his small history paintings, this canvas depicts an important historical event: the moment when Philip V decorated the Duke of Berwick for his military prowess in defending the Bourbon claim against the Austrian empire in the context of the War of the Spanish Succession. Ingres always prized this canvas, presenting it as one of his works of most academic merit when he entered the Institut de France.

In contrast to his heroic, martial treatment of the male nude, which he had learned from David, Ingres’ approach to the genre of the female nude was entirely based on the erotic charge inherent in the beauty of the female body and he paid no heed to the aesthetic canons of the academic nude. His Odalisque, devoid of any moral argument and not associated with either history or mythology, became famous as a direct invitation to sensual pleasure. As such, it is considered the first great nude in the modern tradition.

Combining eroticism with a certain element of terror, on occasions Ingres located his female nudes in dangerous, hostile environments. Ruggiero rescuing Angelica depicts a recognisable literary fantasy and one that was appreciated by the public of the day.

Bound with chains or captive in a harem, Ingres’ ideal women, appealingly contorted in their leisurely abandonment to a pleasure outside everyday reality, have been seen as the complete but also the complementary antithesis of the moral virtue which masculinity was considered to embody.

While for European art critics of the time, religious painting was the preserve of the Nazarenes, led by Johann Friedrich Overbeck (1789-1869), Ingres offered a convincing alternative to that German artist’s Christian painting, making use of it to establish his more solid prestige as a history painter. For an artist who invented the “religion of art” and who venerated Raphael as the first apostle of formal beauty, finding his place in this narrow artistic field was not an easy endeavour. Nonetheless, his ongoing interest in religious subjects, evident throughout most of his career, led him to produce monumental compositions with historical settings, either involving an epic treatment, as in The Martyrdom of Saint Symphorian (Autún, cathedral), or a more iconic one, such as The Vow of Louis XIII (Montauban, cathedral).

In addition, Ingres’ small-format devotional works, the majority depicting the Virgin Mary, enjoyed enormous success with his clients, with critics and with an ever growing public that demanded reproductions of them in the form of prints.

For his celebrated Turkish Bath, Ingres based himself on passages from an 18th-century account by Lady Mary Montagu, wife of an English ambassador, following her visit to a Turkish bath in which she described how the women bathed in preparation for the wedding of one of them. Ingres reproduced the warm, aqueous sensuality of a scene forbidden to male eyes. Completed when the artist was eighty-two, the painting’s execution must have given him numerous sleepless nights as it is known that he worked on it for years, drawing and studying the theme in order to adapt it to his own aesthetic. He first painted it in a rectangular format but the subject’s erotic charge convinced him to transform it into a tondo. This revised format, with its circular shape that functions to emphasise the musical sinuosity of the women’s opulent curves, also encourages a more private gaze.

The culmination of erotic idealisation of the female body in which the abundant curves, arranged in a fragmented manner, reflect an accumulated sexual charge, Ingres’ work is among the most authentic of his entire oeuvre, while it also reveals his love of variations and repetitions of the same subject.