Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres

gigatos | February 21, 2022

Summary

Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres (1780-1867) was a French artist, painter and graphic artist, generally recognized as the leader of nineteenth-century European academism. He received both an artistic and musical education, and in 1797-1801 he studied in the studio of Jacques-Louis David. In 1806-1824 and 1835-1841 he lived and worked in Italy, mainly in Rome and Florence (1820-1824). He was director of the School of Fine Arts in Paris (1834-1835) and the French Academy in Rome (1835-1840). As a young man he was professionally engaged in music, played in the orchestra of the Toulouse Opera (1793-1796), later communicated with Niccolò Paganini, Luigi Cherubini, Charles Gounod, Hector Berlioz and Franz Liszt.

Engré”s work is divided into a number of stages. As an artist he was formed very early, and already in David”s workshop his stylistic and theoretical explorations were in conflict with the doctrines of his teacher: Ingres was interested in the art of the Middle Ages and the Quattrocento. In Rome, Engré was definitely influenced by the Nazarene style; his own development shows a number of experiments, compositional solutions and subjects closer to Romanticism. In the 1820s, he experienced a serious creative break, after which he began to use almost exclusively traditional formal techniques and subjects, although not always consistently. Engrère defined his art as “keeping true doctrines rather than innovation,” but aesthetically he constantly went beyond neoclassicism, which was reflected in his break with the Salon de Paris in 1834. Engré”s declared aesthetic ideal was the opposite of Delacroix”s romantic ideal, which led to a persistent and sharp polemic with the latter. With few exceptions, Engré”s works are devoted to mythological and literary themes, as well as to the history of antiquity, interpreted in an epic spirit. He is also regarded as the greatest representative of historicism in European painting, stating that the development of painting reached its peak under Raphael, then went in the wrong direction, and his, Aingres, mission is to continue from the same level that was reached during the Renaissance. Engré”s art is integral in style, but very heterogeneous typologically, and therefore evaluated differently by contemporaries and descendants. In the second half of the twentieth century Ingres”s works were exhibited in thematic expositions of classicism, romanticism and even realism.

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Montauban – Toulouse. Childhood and adolescence

Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres was born on August 29, 1780 in Montauban in southwestern France. He was the first-born in the family of Jean-Marie-Joseph Engres (1755-1814) and Anne Moulet (1758-1817). His father was originally from Toulouse but settled in patriarchal Montauban, where he excelled as a versatile painter who took on painting, sculpture, and architecture, and was also known as a violinist. Engrère Sr. was later elected a member of the Académie de Toulouse. He probably wanted his son to follow in his footsteps, especially since Jean Auguste showed early talent as an artist and began to copy his father”s work and those works of art that were in his home collection. Jean Auguste received his first lessons in music and drawing at home and was then sent to the École des Frères de l”Éducation Chrétienne in Montauban, where he was able, at a very early age, to flourish as a painter and violinist.

In 1791, his father decided that his son needed a more fundamental education and sent him to the Académie Royale de Peinture, Sculpture and Architecture in Toulouse, which had lost its “royal” status due to the twists and turns of the revolution. Engré spent six years in Toulouse up to 1797, and his mentors were the famous artists of the time: Guillaume-Joseph Rocque, the sculptor Jean-Pierre Vigan and the landscape painter Jean Briand. Roque once took a retirement trip to Rome, during which he met Jacques-Louis David. Engrère excelled at painting and won several awards during his years of study, as well as studying art history well. At the Toulouse competition for young artists in 1797, Engrère won first prize for drawing from life, and Guillaume Roque impressed upon him that it was important for a successful artist to be a good observer and portraitist, able to faithfully reproduce nature. At the same time, Roch worshipped the art of Raphael and instilled in Engrère a lifelong respect for him. Jean Auguste began painting portraits, mainly to make a living, signing his work “Ingres son” (fr. Ingres-fils). He did not abandon music lessons under the guidance of the famous violinist Lejeune. In 1793-1796 he was second violinist in the Orchestre du Capitole de Toulouse, an opera house.

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Paris. David”s Workshop

According to F. Conisby, in Ingres” time, the only way for a provincial artist to grow professionally was to move to Paris. The main center of art education in France was then the High School of Fine Arts, where Jean Auguste entered in August 1797. The choice of David”s studio was due to his fame in revolutionary Paris. David in his studio not only introduced numerous students to the ideals of classical art, but also taught writing and drawing from nature and methods of its interpretation. In addition to David”s studio, the young Engrère attended the Académie de Suisse, founded by the former sitter Charles Suisse, where it was possible to paint for a small fee. This fostered the artist”s development in direct contact with models of various kinds. Engrère clearly stood out among the many students of David, who appreciated his skill and talent. In 1799, he engaged Jean Auguste to work on a portrait of Madame Recamier, in which Ingres was to perform some minor details. Because the work was extremely slow, the model and the artist quarreled and the portrait was left unfinished, Engres only managed to finish the candelabra on the left.

While working for David, Engrère willingly copied some of his canvases, in particular The Oath of Horace. Paris at the end of the eighteenth century was also enriched by museum collections, both confiscated from aristocrats and taken from the Netherlands, which spurred Ingres to constant visits to the Louvre and the study of medieval art. From this time there was a rift between teacher and pupil, as Ingres deliberately distanced himself from David, while his mentor felt something alien in the young artist”s early style and called it “gothic” and even “revolutionary. It sounds paradoxical, because Engr, having inherited from David the adoration of the art of antiquity and the Renaissance, sought to get rid of the revolutionary overtones, which was explained by the changing moods in society. It was in David”s workshop that Ingres” aesthetic program, which he declared until the end of his life, was formed. Thus, with his characteristic categorical nature, Ingres already at the end of his life declared: “Nothing essential can be discovered in art after Fidius and Raphael. In expanded form, this thesis was formulated by him as follows:

…In my works I follow only one example – antiquity and the great masters of that illustrious age, when Raphael established the eternal and immutable boundaries of beauty in art.

Already from Engré”s apprenticeship a large number of drawings have survived, which show that the young artist carefully studied nature. However, the aesthetic principles that he absorbed required idealization, because in the view of the classicists “art should only be beautiful and teach beauty,” and ugliness appears to be an accident and “is not the main feature of living nature. Principles do not turn into dogma – in the best of his works Engré sought an independent interpretation of classical models and its synthesis with nature. This deepened his aesthetic conflict with David. In his diary, Engres wrote:

Although I remained largely faithful to his beautiful principles, I think I found a new way, adding to his love of antiquity a taste for the living model, a study of the Italian masters, particularly Raphael.

From 1800 Engrère entered the competition for the Prix de Rome, presenting Scipio with his son and the ambassadors of Antiochus (not survived), but it won only second place. The artist continued to work hard, and in January 1801 he was awarded the prize for his full-scale lumbar depiction of the male torso. This canvas shows that the 21-year-old Engré had already established himself as an academic painter, able to work equally easily with silhouette, lighting effects and shapes. In the same year, 1801, the painting Agamemnon”s Ambassadors to Achilles was awarded the Rome Prize, which allowed Ingres to go to the French Academy in Rome for four years. The subject of the painting is taken from the Trojan cycle: it depicts Odysseus (in red garb), Ajax and the elder Phoenix, sent by Agamemnon to reconcile with the great hero. Achilles is depicted playing the lyre in the company of Patroclus. The critics noted that Engrand”s desire to show the story in great detail made the left side of the work look a bit overloaded. V. Razdolskaya wrote that Ingres followed classicist principles in The Ambassadors: the composition is like a bas-relief, the characters are also statuarial, and the artist interpreted the antic prototypes freely. F. Conisby noted that Torso and Ambassadors signify the final break between Ingres and David: these paintings were strongly influenced by the style of John Flaxman, and Ingres was very consistent in expressing Flaxman”s graphic quality in oil painting. In 1801 the painting was Engrère”s debut at the Salon de Paris and was well received. In 1802, Flaxman examined the painting and found it “the best of all that has been created by the modern French school. This review became known to David and deeply wounded him, and a complete rupture in the relationship between teacher and pupil soon followed. Because of David”s opposition, Engrère was only able to exhibit his works again at the Salon of 1806. In addition, because of the dire economic situation of the state, Ingres had to wait five years for appropriations for a trip to Rome.

In 1801, Engrère, waiting for the Prix de Rome, received a small scholarship allowing him to keep a studio in the convent of the Capuchins, nationalized during the Revolution. With him lived and worked with David”s pupils, Giraudet and Groh, the sculptor Lorenzo Bartolini, a close friend from David”s period of study, and François-Marius Grane, a native of southern France. All of these artists later interacted closely during their stay in Rome. Pierre Revoy and Fleury Richard, who were most interested in the Middle Ages, also resided in the monastery; their tastes and views were later to a certain extent reflected in the work of Ingres.

Engré”s creative path began during the Consulate and the First Empire, and his contemporary situation determined his complete apolitical nature. A graduate of the École des Beaux-Arts, he had to earn his living while waiting for a retirement trip to Rome, and painting portraits was the solution. Engré fully shared the academists” views on the genre system and defined himself as a historical painter, while portraits, as he understood them, were an “inferior” genre that could only be practiced to earn a living. However, according to V. Razdolskaya, it is in portraits that Ingres was able to “express, and brilliantly, his time.

Engres created his most famous portraits of his early period in 1804-1805. Self-portrait” of the 24-year-old artist (in 1850, Engres completely rewrote it) turned out to be very peculiar. The figure is transferred here as a large, monolithic mass, and the composition and the severity of color solutions reveal academic training of the author. Against this background, the expression of the gaze stands out, something that Ingres always sought in his painting, for he taught that “in every head, the main thing to do is to make the eyes speak.” Engres painted himself at work, tracing a canvas stretched on a stretcher with chalk, and the image is painted in the spirit not of academism but of Romanticism. Numerous details (carelessness of hair and folds of cloak), the pose of the hero, disconnected from creativity, show that he is a creator and servant of beauty, which fully meets the aesthetics of Romanticism. And later Engres recreated in the portraits the intense inner life of the model, most often the images of his friends-artists. A departure from the canons of academism provoked the attacks of the critics at the Salon of 1806.

The other – secular – side of Ingres” portrait art is embodied by three images of the Rivière family – father, wife and daughter. This type of portraits is based on the findings of David, but enriched by the attention to costume details and accessories. The portraits of the Rivière family cannot be considered a series either, as they differ greatly in form, composition, and stylistic features. “Portrait of Philibert Rivière” shows a prominent official of the Empire, he sits calmly, his posture elegant. Equally calm is the expression of his face. His coloring is restrained, dominated by a black tails and yellowish pantaloons, set off by a red tablecloth on the table and the same upholstery on the armchair. In the portrait of Madame Rivière, Engrère emphasized the model”s attractiveness, which is also shown in her pose and attire. The combination of velvet upholstery on the sofa and shades of Kashmir shawl Engres later used in other women”s portraits. Engres incorporated rhythmic and color variety into the oval, which seamlessly combined the movement of rounded lines. Art historians contrasted these two portraits the image of his daughter – Caroline Riviere. Ingres sought in this image, a special lyricism, Jean Cassou in 1947 called it “French Mona Lisa. In the portraits of mother and daughter Riviere Ingres first used his characteristic device – the disproportionate representation of the figure. In the portrait of Madame Rivière there are discrepancies in the size of the head, shoulders and chest line. The gloves on Caroline Rivière”s hands give the impression that “the hands are too large for such a graceful young creature. Exhibited at the Salon of 1806 – after the departure of the artist in Italy – portraits have caused criticism, amounted mainly to censure: Engres too far from the academic canons and precepts of David. Critics reacted harshly to the “gothic” style of the portrait of Caroline Riviere, reproaching the artist in the “deliberate accuracy and dry drawing” the figure of a young girl.

In July 1803, Engrère received an important state order – Napoleon Bonaparte decided to award the city of Liège his official portrait. At that time, Engré continued to receive a stipend, but it was very small, and his earnings from portraits were also irregular. The fee amounted to 3,000 francs. For a 23-year-old artist, a life-size portrait of the head of state was a very serious task; it also testifies to the status of Engres, for it is unlikely that a completely unknown young painter would be engaged for the purposes of state propaganda. Ingres had very much hoped to exhibit a portrait of the First Consul in the Salon, but by the time the painting was completed – July 1804 – Napoleon had proclaimed himself emperor, and the political goal had become irrelevant. That same year, Engrère”s father visited Paris and they saw each other for the last time, the result of the meeting being a portrait painted by Jean Auguste. Jean Engrère Sr. may have intended to say goodbye to his son before his departure for Rome, but that year, too, the retirement trip was postponed again.

“The portrait of Bonaparte, the first consul, has been assessed differently by various critics. V. Razdolskaya argued that it was “spectacular and striking in color, but lacking true figurative significance. D. Perova, on the contrary, argues that “this is how Bonaparte came to power in 1799 – resolute, confident and unwavering general. She also emphasizes the meticulousness of Engres in the transfer of the smallest details, texture of fabrics. In 1806, Engrère created a highly ambitious Napoleon on the Imperial Throne (measuring 259 × 162 cm) on his own initiative. No documents have survived that would shed light on the circumstances of the portrait, but at any rate it was presented at the Salon of 1806 and subsequently placed in the Bourbon Palace. Engrù”s composition seems to have been modeled on the Ghent altarpiece then transported to Paris; the figure of Napoleon has been compared with Van Eyck”s image of God the Father. There is also a version of the influence of Flaxman”s illustrations of the Iliad, in which case Zeus was the model. There is no analogy for this almost Byzantine allegory of power in the varied iconography of Napoleon.

In the spring of 1806, funds were allocated for a four-year retirement trip to Rome. At the same time, Engré met the 24-year-old artist Anne-Marie-Julie Forestier and quickly became engaged. He created a graphic family portrait of Forestier, in which he depicted her parents, uncle, and maid in addition to his bride. Ann Forestier”s father and uncle were prominent lawyers, and they saw the long trip as the best way to solidify the engagement: the future son-in-law was expected to return famous and with a good income. In September, a few days before the Salon opened, Engré left for Rome.

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A Retirement Trip to Rome (1806-1811)

Through Milan, Bologna and Florence Engré followed to Rome, where he arrived on October 11, 1806. He settled in the Villa Medici, the residence of the French Academy, but, judging by his correspondence with Forestier, at first he was bored and longed to return to Paris. It was not until 1807 that he realized the peculiarity of Italy and began to work actively, primarily by accurately and succinctly capturing the urban views that attracted him. Engré was warmly received by the then director of the Academy – Joseph Suvé, who felt that retirees from Paris needed not guidance, but full creative freedom. Engré, as in Paris, was not too eager to communicate with his colleagues; his correspondence usually mentions Thomas Nodet and Marius Granet. His main circle of communication and customers were almost exclusively representatives of the French colony in Rome.

The first Roman year also includes three small oil landscapes in the form of tondos; the most famous of these is Raphael”s House. There is a suggestion that Engrère in this respect anticipated Corot by creating a purely French genre of romantic landscape in which compositional structure and color are harmoniously balanced. These qualities are also often found in the landscape backgrounds of Engrö”s portraits. The reverence for Raphael that had previously characterized Engrère became a “cult” in Rome. Visiting the Vatican and viewing Raphael”s Stans, he wrote in his diary:

Never had they seemed so beautiful to me, and it became clear to me <…> to what extent this divine man could fascinate other people. I became definitively convinced that he worked as a genius, owning all nature in his head or in his heart, and that when this happens, one becomes a second creator… And I, unhappy as I am, have regretted all my life that I was not born in his age and was not one of his disciples.

Other important sources of inspiration for Ingres were ancient monuments, and not so much Roman reliefs and sculptures, which were models for David and his entourage, as Greek vases with their linear rhythm and flat understanding of form. This led him to study pre-Raphaelian painting in Italy, then called “primitive,” and medieval book miniatures. There is also reason to believe that Ingres was seriously interested in the art of the East, in any case, one of his contemporaries ironically called him “the Chinese artist lost in the ruins of Athens. His intensive work also led him to break off his engagement as early as August 1807, writing in his last letter to Forestier that it was now unthinkable for him to leave Italy.

The manifold impressions of the first Roman year were not simply perceived by Ingres, but subordinated to the already formed doctrine of beauty and perfection of form. Engres finally came to the conclusion that the structure of the pictorial form must be dominated by drawing, the line, which he called “the highest honesty of art” and interpreted extremely broadly. He wrote:

Drawing is not just making outlines; drawing is not just about lines. Drawing is also expressiveness, inner form, plan, modeling… Drawing contains more than three-quarters of what painting is all about.

In other words, color in Ingres” system of values played a subordinate role, yielding to the linear-planar concept of form. The coloring of Engré paintings is built on a combination of local spots, tonally not always related to each other. The harmony of composition is rational; some contemporaries compared Ingres” paintings to lined solitaire.

All of the above features are inherent in the report works of Ingres, which he sent to the Salon de Paris. The Salon of 1808 was a milestone in the development of French artistic life and is sometimes called “pre-Romantic. Engres sent in that year a painting Oedipus and the Sphinx, his first reporting canvas. Engres focused on the episode of the mental duel, when the hero solves an unsolvable riddle. Engres showed the half-woman half-lion of Greek mythology in the shadow of the rocks, which symbolized the “dark,” irrational nature of the mystery that opposes the light of Oedipus” mind. His face is concentrated, his body depicted “alive” in contrast to the statuariness of the Sphinx figure. The work was praised by the director of the School of Fine Arts, who wrote that “Oedipus embodies the beautiful spirit of antiquity, high and noble art” and that the painting represents “the spirit of the master of the last centuries of the Roman Empire.

In Rome, Engrère continued to work in the portrait genre, creating images of M. Grane and Madame Devorce (both 1807). The artist also did many graphic portraits. The portrait of Madame Devoset is sometimes compared to Raphael”s portraits, which served as a starting point for Ingres. Compared with the Renaissance prototype, however, the French artist”s work had more decorative elements, and the model”s gaze, as usual with Ingres, is fixed on the viewer and “seeks contact with him. However, the most remarkable in the art of Ingres of the Roman period is his treatment of the nude, interpreted, however, very chaste. And in the future the genre of nudes remained the subject of creative interest of the artist until the end of his life. As for all academics, the naked female body for Ingres embodied the highest expression of beauty. By 1808 refers to “The Great Bather” or “Bather of Valpinson” (named after the collector-owner), written in a relatively short period of time in a single creative impulse. According to contemporary art historians, in this painting, Engrère achieved harmony in the perception of nature and the embodiment of its forms. The figure is depicted from the back, and the outline creates a sense of unified movement of the brush. Both light and shadows are balanced, the color solution is also restrained: yellowish tones of the body, greenish curtain on the left and white drapery. Colorful emphasis is placed only on the headband pattern at the very edge of the gray background.

Engré”s stay in Rome was summed up by his enormous painting Jupiter and Fetide, completed in 1811. It is considered that in this work Engrère expressed himself and his own understanding of the creative mission of the artist most fully. The subject was taken from the first song of the Iliad, the scene in which the nereidic Fetid begs Zeus-Jupiter to support the Trojans in order to avenge Achilles, who was insulted by Agamemnon. Formally the canvas fully complied with classicist canons – the composition is frontal, the clear primacy of drawing and the rigorous writing out of details are noticeable, but in fact it was a sample of arbitrary compositional solution. The spatial structure of the painting is irrational: Jupiter”s throne floats in the sky, and his large-scale figure is contrasted with the nestled Fetide. Once again, Engres deviated from anatomical precision, depicting the flowing forms of the nereid as boneless, especially her arms, and the thrown back head was also depicted quite unnaturally. This was done for the sake of particular expression, to emphasize the grace of the heroine and the drama of her position, especially in contrast with the impassivity of the king of the gods. In so doing, Engré combined expressiveness with the utmost arbitrariness in his treatment of the human figures. He himself argued that a distortion of proportions, forms and scale relationships was permissible, as long as it helped to emphasize character and “bring out the element of beauty. As a result, he succeeded in creating a composition that is integral in linear rhythm and also one of the most successful in terms of color. The intense blue sky with white clouds accentuates the pinkish-orange cloak of Jupiter, the yellow-green drapery of Thetis forms a triad with them, a completely unconventional interpretation of classicist color solutions.

Roman critics and European artists who lived in the Eternal City fully appreciated Engrère”s innovation. The Danish critic T. Brun-Nyregor, who saw Jupiter and Fetide in Rome, wrote enthusiastically that “Ingres is a superbly educated artist who, despite his young age, is the main hope for the revival of the French school. North of the Alps did not share these views, the painting exhibited at the Salon of 1812 provoked fierce criticism from representatives of Classicism. Subsequently, this painting and similar works were appreciated by the representatives of French Romanticism. The unfair criticism and his desire to remain in Italy prompted Ingres to quit the Academy. He left Villa de” Medici and became a freelance painter in Rome.

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Rome. Free Artist (1811-1819)

Freed from his duties as a retired painter, Ingres could continue his experiments, but at the same time he had to earn a living. By engaging in portraits, from 1809 he gradually created a circle of customers and admirers, which to a certain extent guaranteed him constant earnings. For several years his main source of livelihood was graphic portraits which were commissioned by wealthy travelers in Rome. This genre disappeared completely with the advent of photography. Engré developed a particular technique based on the tradition of 16th century French pencil portraiture and could complete a drawing in a single session. He worked with a finely honed lead pencil, conveying the figure in a single, uninterrupted line, with almost no modeling. The costume and accessories may have received more or less attention, but the face was always detailed. Among the family graphic portraits from the Roman period, the Stamati Family stands out, combining compositional integrity and dynamism. The drawing depicts the family of the French consul at Civitavecchia. Baudelaire argued that it was in the drawings that Engrère best combined the demands of the ideal and nature. Engrère himself, commenting on his creative method, stated, “When constructing a figure, do not create it piece by piece, coordinate everything at once and, as correctly said, draw an ensemble.”

In Rome, Engrère quickly became a fashionable artist, especially among the French aristocracy who came to Rome with Napoleon”s relatives. As early as 1809 he received his first commission from Joachim Murat. In addition to portraits, he received in 1812, several orders for decoration of interiors, including a huge composition (5 meters long) “Romulus, victorious Akron” for the Roman residence of Napoleon. Engres executed it in tempera, which allowed him to imitate the style of Quattrocento frescoes by constructing the image as a frieze. Another famous painting of this period was “The Dream of Ossian,” commissioned on the theme of McPherson”s mystification, which was extremely fashionable at the time (Napoleon was a fan of it). In Engres” painting, the gray-haired Ossian fell asleep leaning on his lyre, a dreamlike space opening above him, recreating the cloudy world of Elysium and the ghostly figures of nymphs, heroes, and muses. “Ossian”s Dream is a painting that demonstrates the freedom of the romantic solution, which is emphasized by the sharp contrasts of light and shadow, the irreality of the depicted space and the incorporeality of the figures.

In 1813, Engrère married. During his six years in Rome he had romantic feelings for various women, including the daughter of a Danish archaeologist. The wife of one of Engré”s customers, a prominent official at the imperial palace in Rome, suggested that the artist correspond with his cousin Madeleine Chapelle. During the correspondence, Engrère attempted to draw her portrait based on the descriptions in the letters, and when he met her in person in September, the real image and the drawing coincided. In turn, Madeleine wrote to her sister that Ingres – “an artist of great talent, not a pimp, not a drunkard, not a libertine and yet earns from ten to twelve thousand francs a year. In December they were married. Perhaps in early 1814, Engrère painted a portrait of his young wife, which is a simple and psychologically intimate, very different from the commissioned portraits. The image of Madeleine refers to the Raphaelian female characters, Engres later wrote his wife in those of his works, where it was necessary to subordinate a living prototype of the sublime ideal.

In 1814, Engré suffered two losses at once: his and Madeleine”s child died the same day he was born (they had no more children), and a few months later Jean-Joseph Engré died in France, with whom his son had not seen for 10 years. Jean-Auguste continued to work intensely and painted several of his famous works, including Raphael and Farnarina and The Great Odalisque. Engres created The Great Odalisque for Napoleon”s sister Caroline Murat, for which he specifically spent several months in Naples. One of his works was also a portrait of Caroline Murat. By the time Odalisque was finished, the Queen of Naples had been deposed, and the painting remained in the artist”s studio. For the sake of the elegance of the back line, the artist allowed an anatomical distortion by adding two or three vertebrae to the model, which was immediately noticed by the critics. On this occasion the artist stated:

As for truthfulness, I prefer it to be exaggerated a bit, although it is risky.

“The Great Odalisque” shows Engrère”s interest in Orientalism, generally characteristic of the Romantic era. Idealizing the external beauty, Ingres considered himself not entitled only to copy a real woman and created an unattainable image born of fantasy. In the same year, the painter returned to the theme of Raphael, which had long interested him, by creating the composition Raphael and Fornarina, which shows a paired portrait of his idol with his lover. On his easel Engrère showed an unfinished painting of Fornarina and, in the background, a tondo of Madonna della Sedia, for which Raphael posed with the same sitter.

“Raphael and Fornarina marked the beginning of a large series of small paintings whose subjects are based on a variety of historical anecdotes and Renaissance literature. These are “Ariosto and the Ambassador of Charles V”, “Paolo and Francesca”, “Ruggiero Liberating Angelica”, “The Death of Leonardo da Vinci”, “Pope Pius VII in the Sistine Chapel” and some others. They were mostly painted on orders from French officials and aristocrats, particularly the French ambassador to Rome, de Blacq, who bought most of Engré”s canvases. The style of these works mimicked that of the Quattrocento masters, with Ingres actively continuing to distort the anatomy, achieving the utmost refinement of poses and expression. A striking example is the depiction of Angelica chained to a rock. A particularly complete rendering of the Renaissance style is characteristic of Death of Leonardo. In this painting the color scheme stands out, in which red tones in combination with the whiteness of Leonardo”s bed and hair take the lead. Stendhal claimed that the portrait of the king in this painting belongs “among the most beautiful historical paintings. The historical situation depicted in the picture is unreliable: King Francis I was not and could not be present at the great artist”s deathbed. This, however, bothered Engré and his customers very little. During the same period he created one of his few paintings on a contemporary theme – Pope Pius VII in the Sistine Chapel. The artist”s main task was to faithfully depict the frescoes in the Sistine Chapel, including Michelangelo”s “Last Judgment” on the west wall.

The painting Ruggero, Liberating Angelica again did not fit into the framework of classicism, on the contrary, the plot and composition correspond to the aesthetics of the Romantic school of painting, although Engres was an ardent opponent of it. The subject is taken from Ariosto”s epic The Furious Roland. Interest in medieval and Renaissance poetry was also revived in the 19th century by the Romantics, who valued the transfer of characters” mental qualities and sensuality of nature by means of poetry. It was natural for Ingres to refer to Dante”s story of Paolo and Francesca da Rimini.

After the fall of Napoleon”s empire in 1815 and the Congress of Vienna, French subjects living in Rome began to leave the city in droves. For Ingres, financially dependent on a narrow circle of customers, this meant the impossibility of making money as before. Home critics still ignored Ingres” paintings or spoke highly negatively of them, and it was only in 1818 that Jean Auguste decided to exhibit new work at the Salon. In 1817 his mother passed away. In the same year came some financial relief: the government of Louis XVIII began to buy decorative paintings of Ingres on the plan of reconstruction of the Palace of Versailles. Ingres” style of historical genre paintings met the tastes of the new authorities: nostalgia for stable royal power under the “old order.

In his last years in Rome, Engré made his living only drawing portraits of tourists, mostly British, which irritated him greatly. An anecdote of this time is well known: one day a family of tourists knocked on the door of Engré”s studio, and the head of the family asked: “Is this where the man who paints wonderfully lively little portraits lives?” Engres answered irritably, “No. The man who lives here is a painter!” Nevertheless, he had no intention of returning to France, where he had no family left, and where the critics met all his new works with unfailing hostility. In 1818 he renewed his acquaintance with Lorenzo Bartolini, an old friend from David”s studio. In June 1819, Jean and Madeleine Engres visited his house in Florence and were invited to settle in that city. In the spring of 1820, the Engres moved to Florence, with Jean Auguste describing Roman life as “13 years of slavery” in a fit of irritation.

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Florence (1820-1824)

The artist”s certificate issued by the Florentine authorities to Engr is dated July 19, 1820, but it is known that Jean Auguste and Madeleine had moved to the city earlier. The Engres moved right into the house of Bartolini, who was then head of the sculpture department of the Florentine Academy of Fine Arts. In all, the artist and his wife lived with Bartolini for four years, and an excellent relationship developed between them all. Bartolini was single, made good money and lived in a vast palace where he received a large number of visitors. Engr was enthusiastic and tried to match the setting, but the attempt to create a secular salon proved unsuccessful. The artist described his way of life as follows:

We get up at 6 o”clock, have breakfast with coffee, and at 7 we separate to do all the day”s work in our atelier. We meet again for lunch at 7, a moment of rest and conversation until it is time to go to the theater, where Bartolini goes every evening… My good wife quietly does her little chores and feels happy with me and I with her.

Bartolini considered copying antique examples insufficient and called for seeking inspiration in the beauty of modern life, showing by means of art not only lofty ideals but also feelings. He once brought a hunchback sitter to a session at the Academy and caused quite a scandal. All these features of Bartolini”s personality are reflected in the portrait by Ingres in 1820, which shows him as a strong-willed and successful man who has achieved wealth and recognition by his work. As usual with Ingres, the portrait is full of specific details. The attributes on the table symbolize his profession (the bust of Cherubini) and characterize his tastes – on the table are works by Dante and Machiavelli, a score by Haydn.

In Florence, Engr continued to engage in portraits. In the Bartolini mansion in 1820 he created one of his most famous “Portrait of Count N.D. Guriev”. At that time Bartolini was sculpting the count”s wife. Despite the haughty and impassioned look of the portrayed, according to V. Razdolskaya, Engr added “a touch of romantic excitement” to the picture thanks to the landscape with thunderous skies and blue mountains in the distance. The color scheme, however, is defined by the pinkish-red lining of the cloak, and its combination with the bluish tones of the landscape belies the widespread opinion that Engrère is a weak colorist. Count Guryev was the subject of the only commissioned portrait of the six made by Engres in Florence. The other five portrayed his friends and were done at his leisure from his main occupation.

On August 29, 1820, soon after moving to Florence, Engré received a commission that completely changed his life and led to a serious creative breakthrough. He was commissioned by the French Ministry of the Interior to paint an altarpiece for the cathedral of the artist”s homeland, Montauban, with the theme “Vow of Louis XIII asking for the protection of the French kingdom. Its creation required four years of hard work and led to a complete return to the canons of neoclassicism and the rejection of romantic experiments.

When he began work on the painting, Engrère was primarily engaged in historical research, carefully reading the sources. He acknowledged that combining the images of the king and the Virgin in one composition was anachronistic, but he believed that if it was done in the spirit of Raphael, it would be a success in the end. In one of his letters Engrère commented on his idea as follows:

Half of the painting is the Madonna ascending to heaven, supported by angels; the other half is the king in his chapel or chapel. That very day Louis XIII believed that the Madonna appeared before him in a holy vision. He then took his scepter and crown, placed on the steps of the altar, and held them out to the Madonna, asking for Her protection…

The artist had long been unable to find the means of expression for his hero until he copied two portraits by Philippe de Champenya at the Uffizi Gallery, from which he borrowed the attire and pose of the kneeling monarch. Once the composition was determined, Engrère became impatient. In one of his letters in 1822 (17 months after the start of work), the artist said that “can not waste time,” for firmly decided to exhibit his creation at the Salon. However, the painting was finally finished by October 1824.

The result of Engré”s almost four-year labors has been assessed quite differently by his contemporaries and contemporary art historians. From the point of view of V. Razdolskaya, the painting became a “stylistic reconstruction” in which the Raphaelian influence completely leveled the creative originality of Engré himself. This applies above all to the Madonna and angels, which are clearly discernible direct borrowings from the “Sistine Madonna” or “Madonna di Foligno”. Combined with the portrait of the king a completely eclectic work is formed. Even the color solutions are far from the harmony of the best works of Ingres – the blue cloak of the Virgin is too sharply opposed to the red color of the tunic dress and does not harmonize with the golden tones of the background and dark curtains. “Only the robes … of the angels, shimmering with pinkish-golden hues, bring to mind the best coloristic findings of Ingres, as does the perfect plasticity of the figures.”

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Discussion with Delacroix

The Paris Salon of 1824 opened while Engrère was still on the road. His works made in Florence and Rome, including The Sistine Chapel and The Death of Leonardo, were presented there. This time the 44-year-old artist”s work was favorably received by both the public and critics, including Stendhal. However, it was not until November 12, 1824 – 15 days before it closed – that Ingres was able to exhibit The Vow of Louis XIII at the Salon, after which critics unanimously called it “the Salon of the Romantic Battle”: Delacroix”s The Massacre of Chios was simultaneously on display. A rapturous reception awaited Ingres, with admirers and critics alike drawing attention to the same features and using the same expressions – the artist was proclaimed (or condemned) as “Raphael of our day” and “the best antidote to the Romantic menace.” Signs of attention from the conservative French kingdom followed immediately: the artist was awarded the Legion of Honor by King Charles X personally, and in 1825 he was elected a member of the Academy of Fine Arts (of which he had been a corresponding member since 1823). As a result, the artist decided to remain in France and officially lead the artistic life of the country.

The confrontation at the Salon of 1824 was the beginning of a feud between Hingre and Delacroix, the recognized major painters of France at the time, who embodied opposing aesthetic concepts. Hingre referred to Delacroix as his “anti-me” and was clearly more irreconcilable in their confrontation, actively using the administrative resources available to him. Thus, Ingres did not allow Delacroix to be elected to the Institut de France, for he considered him unworthy of becoming an officially recognized master and mentor of new generations of artists. At the same time, J. Cassoux in his biography of Ingres noted that in the hatred that separated the two artists, you can see a deep interest in each other, with a touch of curiosity and even reverence.

Shortly after the Salon was closed, Engré rented a studio in the Marais Saint-Germain (now Visconti Street) and opened a studio for the training of young artists. The first of them was E. Amaury-Duval, who later published memoirs about his teacher. Within a year, up to a hundred students could attend Ingres” studio. Engres was able to fully realize his pedagogical aspirations, which until then he could only describe in his notebooks, filled with categorical statements. Engres called the school “Drawing School”, justifying it as follows:

If I had to put a sign above my door, I”d write “School of Drawing,” and I”m sure I”d create painters.

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“Homer”s Apotheosis.”

His busy teaching and official commissions meant that during the 10 years of his second Parisian period, Engrère painted only five portraits (and 75 graphic portraits). The largest and most honourable of his commissions was the 1826 composition The Apotheosis of Homer, a huge (386 × 515 cm) plafond for the future royal museum of Etruscan and Egyptian antiquities in the Louvre. The subject was left to the artist himself. It was a worthy occasion for Ingres to devote himself entirely to the higher academic genre – historical and allegorical painting. Homer was put in the basis of the plot not by chance – Engres believed the ancient Greek rhapsode as the primary source and standard of all the beautiful in art in general and literature in particular:

Homer was the first in his poetry to make sense of the beauties of the world, like the God who created life, separating it from chaos. Homer educated humanity once and for all, he embodied beauty in immortal rules and examples.

Engres dared to reflect in the painting his views on the artist as a mentor and to personify the work of those greats who were worthy, in his opinion, to be called followers of Homer. The composition of the Apotheosis is strictly central and based on Raphael”s School of Athens. In the background of the antique portico the great elder Homer is depicted on a throne, he is crowned with laurels of Glory. Below, on the sides of the throne, are shown allegories of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Then in mirror symmetry are displayed 42 figures (41 men and the only woman – Sappho) of artists, writers and politicians from ancient times to the 17th century. In selecting the persons of the “greats,” Ingres displayed an almost curious intolerance for those who were personally antipathic to him. Rubens was excluded, whom Ingres called a “butcher,” and only after much hesitation was Shakespeare added. He tried to introduce dynamism into the composition: Apelles leads Raphael to the throne, while on the other side Pindar hands him a lyre. Phidias is holding the attributes of his profession – a chisel and a hammer. At the bottom of the composition on the left is Poussin, transcribed by Engres from his famous self-portrait.

Although the composition was designed for the plafond, Engrère decided it as an easel work, without counting on perspective reductions and distortions of figures and architectural elements. However, as early as 1855 the “Apotheosis” was presented at the World Exhibition in Paris as a painting, and from there it went to the Louvre. A copy made by his pupil, Remont Balzs, was placed in the place of the original Engres.

“Engrère attached great importance to Apotheosis, believing that this particular painting would become “the most beautiful and the most important work of his entire life. Indeed, it is one of his most programmatic works, which can be interpreted as a pictorial declaration. In Ingres”s understanding, European art reached its true heights only in the Raphael era, after which its development took a false path. He saw his task as continuing Renaissance art from the same stage where it had stopped. Of contemporary Engrù”s critics, this view was supported by conservatives from monarchist circles. However, even the radical Charles Delecluze saw in the “Apotheosis” expression of all the academic ideals of beauty, according to which the artist should ennoble reality, rather than reproduce it. Contemporary art critics do not consider this work by Ingres to be a success. V. Razdolskaya calls this composition “frozen” and “devoid of living emotion. Only Homer himself and the allegories of the Iliad and the Odyssey, especially the latter, are recognized as successful in terms of originality and plastic beauty. Unsuccessful is also recognized the color solution, which lacks unity.

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Works from the 1830s

The July Revolution left Ingres indifferent. In the same year he was elected professor at the School of Fine Arts, in 1833 he became its vice-president and, finally, in 1834 he headed it. Engres quite deliberately sought high positions, because they were associated with high incomes and at the same time saved him from having to write custom-made work and depend on the tastes and wishes of clients. However, it was during this period that he produced some of his most famous portraits, most notably Portrait of Louis François Bertin, director of the Journal des débats (1832). During the July Monarchy he was one of the most influential men in the country, and from the beginning Engres wanted to create an image of broad generalization. Amaury Duval recalled that the work went extremely painstakingly, but was completed literally in one day: when he saw Bertin engaged in an animated conversation with his conversation partner, Engrère asked him to come pose tomorrow, for the portrait was ready. Critics note that the portrait is extremely laconic, the coloring is even deliberately parsimonious, it is dominated by the black tones of the redingo and pants, the other shades are brownish-reddish, more sparse in the background. There are no accessories that detract from the character”s face. His contemporaries even called him “the bourgeois Jupiter the thunderer.”

From 1827 the Engres lived in an official apartment at the Academy of Fine Arts; they lived modestly for people of their position, in particular, they kept only one maid. The childless couple frequently attended musical and theatrical performances; on Sundays they themselves organized receptions and musical evenings at which Engrère could demonstrate his art. While still in Italy, he met Niccolò Paganini, performing two of his graphic portraits; however, Amaury-Duval”s memoirs describe Paganini”s concert in Paris on April 10, 1831, at which Engré was only a spectator.

At the Salon of 1834 very controversial assessment received an epic canvas “The Martyrdom of St. Symphorion,” commissioned by the artist back in 1824. He attached extreme importance to this work, many preparatory works have survived. As a result, Engres organized the composition on the principle of bas-relief, focusing the attention of the audience on the characters of the foreground. The more disappointing was the coldness of the public to the results of six years of work. The picture was decidedly restrained in terms of emotion and color. One of the few positive reviews was the judgment of Theophile Gautier, who appreciated the monumental construction of the composition, its grandeur and the artist”s ability to recreate the “harsh spirit of a distant era. Engres was generally intolerant of criticism and, judging by the memories of Amaury Duval, half a century later he could remember every unflattering review of his works. As a result, he categorically refused to participate in the Salon from now on and described the Parisian public as “ignorant and cruel. The public responded in kind to Engré: the painting, exhibited at the Universal Exhibition in 1855, was boycotted a second time and never exhibited in public again.

The only way out for the artist was to leave France. As early as May he applied and two weeks later was unanimously elected head of the French Academy in Rome. On July 5, 1834, the appointment was approved by Minister Thierre. Under the influence of the moment, he even characterized his directorship as a “forced exile.” In December, accompanied by his wife and student Georges Lefrancois, Engrère departed for Rome.

Through Milan, Venice and Florence, Engré reached Rome on January 4, 1835, and settled again at the Villa de” Medici, from which he had parted a quarter of a century earlier. He officially assumed the position of director on January 24, succeeding Horace Vernet (Louise Vernet”s daughter was married to Paul Delaroche in those days). Engres jealously assumed his new duties, which made him more of an art official than an artist. The scholars of the Academy (among them Luigi Mussini) and his collaborators received him with reverence; in addition, affairs at the Villa Medici were neglected because of Vernet”s inability to manage the economy. Engré”s authority with his students was unquestionable; they agreed with all his categorical instructions, for he was a masterful teacher. At the same time, he left little room for students” creative self-realization, and the report works sent to Paris were very reminiscent of the compositions and techniques of Engré himself. As director, Ingres reformed the education of artists: he introduced archaeology into the program and increased the time for field studies, considering them no less important than copying casts. About his innovations he wrote:

Young people should first draw heads from Raphael”s Loggias for a while, then figures from antique bas-reliefs…, then move on to drawing from a living model; copy in oil… paintings and fragments of selected paintings, finally exercise in painting from a living model… Let the student divide his work between studying nature and studying the masters.

One of the most important elements of art education Ingres considered the education of the future artist”s taste on the masterpieces of the past, and the organization of leisure activities served the same purpose. Engres began to organize concerts at the Villa de Medici, where he himself could realize his musical aspirations. It was here that the director became acquainted with Franz Liszt (1839) and Charles Gounod (1841), who performed at the Academy on several occasions. Both Liszt and Gounod left memories of their interactions with Engres. Liszt, in particular, praised the artist”s violin playing (finding it “lovely”) and also recalled that Engrère served as his guide to Rome, revealing to the composer the true value of antique art. Gounod, depicted in a drawing of Engrère at the piano, wrote that the artist”s true passion was Mozart, whose score of Don Giovanni was also depicted in the graphic portrait. However, the composer had a low opinion of Engré the violinist, claiming that his playing lacked virtuosity, although he had played in his youth in the opera house orchestra. Gounod, on the other hand, left a testimony of Engré”s character that contradicts the usual claims of his despotism:

I saw him intimately, often and for a long time, and therefore I can affirm that he was a simple man, straightforward and open, sincere, capable of gusts of enthusiasm… He was gentle as a child and could resent like an apostle, could be touchingly naive and so directly sensitive that it could not be considered a pose, as many thought.

A year before his appointment as director, Xavier Cigallon, a fellow of the School of Fine Arts, was to make a life-size copy of Michelangelo”s The Last Judgment (to be sent to Paris as a teaching aid), but he was unable to break through the opposition of the Vatican authorities. Engr succeeded in obtaining permission for Cigallon to work in the Sistine Chapel, and the copy was executed. Later, however, a conflict arose with the Holy See as Ingres enlisted his students to make copies of Raphael”s 42 frescoes from the stanzas and loggias. As time passed, Engrère”s tolerance for the Roman climate worsened and he often complained of indisposition in his letters. There was a cholera epidemic in Rome in 1835 and 1836, but the director of the Academy imposed a quarantine and spared students and teachers from the disease.

Engré”s productivity as an artist declined somewhat because of his direct duties. He continued to make pencil portraits for his soul (23 in all during his six years in Rome), the models for which were friends and guests. Paintings from the second Roman period left a little, mostly written in the late 1830′s, when the educational process at the Academy was established and the artist has more free time. The line of orthodox academism continued “Madonna before the Cup of Communion”, written in 1841 by order of the heir to the Russian throne – the future Emperor Alexander II. At the request of his patron, Engres painted at the sides of the Virgin Mary two saints revered in Russia – Saint Nicholas and Saint Alexander Nevsky, who were also the patron saints of Emperor Nicholas I and the tsesarevich. The composition of the picture is full of symbolic details – the arrangement of the objects on the table corresponds to the figures behind it: the Madonna has a cup with a prosphora, while the candles in the candlesticks represent St. Nicholas and Alexander Nevsky. The Madonna, as the mother of Jesus Christ, represents the feminine side, symbolized by the shape of the wax; the saints representing the masculine side are represented in the vertical candlesticks. The problem of lighting the figures is also resolved in an original way: the light illuminating the face of the Madonna comes from without, rather than from the flames of candles. In Russia this painting was criticized as catholic in spirit, and indeed the stiffened poses and canonic colors correspond directly with Catholic church iconography. Engres subsequently created eight repetitions of the Moscow painting, recreating both a strict adherence to the canons of classicism and the Raphaelian prototype.

In 1839, Engres returned to the oriental theme by painting The Odalisque and the Slave, also known in the 1842 repetition. This work is in bright, sonorous tones dominated by red, green and yellow-orange, against which the pinkish body of the heroine stands out. Engres made extensive use of Oriental accessories in this work, but the odalisque type itself does not have specifically “Oriental” features, unlike Delacroix”s Moroccan and Algerian women. This is in a sense a return to the romantic oriental concepts of his early experiments, but Engrère”s type of odalisque is closer to the classical ideal of beauty, which he reproduced in many of his works.

Another famous Roman work by Ingres was Antiochus and Stratonica, based on a subject by Plutarch. According to the ancient author, Antiochus, son of Seleucus, was in love with his young stepmother Stratonica and decided to commit suicide by starving himself to death. The doctor Erasistratus guessed the reason when he saw Stratonica walk into the room where Antiochus was prostrate on the bed, and what his reaction was. The story always touched Engrère, according to recollections, he wept when he read it to his students. The story had been popular since the end of the 18th century: it was reproduced by Ingres” teacher David, and in 1792 the opera Stratonica by Meguele was premiered in Paris, which was revived in 1821. The subject fascinated Engres while he was still working on Jupiter and Fetide, but only the order of the Duke of Orleans prompted the artist to realize it. Ingres called this painting “his great historical miniature” (57 × 98 cm). The painting meticulously reproduced the polychrome of the antique interior, which was designed by his student Victor Baltar, and painted in color by the brothers Paul and Remon Balza, who had previously copied Raphael”s frescoes. The figures were painted by Engres himself, giving the composition a melodramatic character: Antiochus covers his face with his hand at the sight of Stratonica, so that she will not notice his excitement. Engres himself served as the prototype of the figure of Seleucus and his student Hippolyte Flandrain as the prototype for Antioch. The image of Stratonica, according to the plan of Engres, was to be the embodiment of the fragility of perfect beauty and subtle lyricism. Both “Odalisque” and “Antioch” were enthusiastically received at the Salon of 1840, which meant the opportunity for Ingres to return to Paris after his term as director of the French Academy ended. The Duke of Orleans sent a special letter full of praise for the work of the celebrated master. April 6, 1841 Jean Auguste and Madeleine Ingres left Rome, but spent the next ten days in Florence, talking to friends with whom they parted twenty years earlier. They traveled to France by sea via Genoa and returned to Paris in mid-May. In all, the artist lived in Italy for twenty-four years.

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Academic works of the 1840s and 1850s

Upon their return from Italy, the spouses of Hingre found that there were no significant changes at the École des Beaux-Arts and the Academy, but the reception they received was rapturous. An official banquet was given in the honor of the artist at the Luxembourg Palace, attended by 400 people, and he was invited to dinner with King Louis-Philippe. Hector Berlioz dedicated a concert to Ingres, at which he conducted a performance of his favorite works, and, finally, the Comédie-Française Theater presented the artist with an honorary counter-ticket to attend all performances for life. By royal decree, he was elevated to the dignity of a peer. He was the first artist to be elevated to the rank of grand officer of the Legion of Honor in 1855. Finally, in 1862, Emperor Napoleon III made Ingres a senator, despite the fact that his hearing deteriorated sharply and he was a poor orator.

In 1846, Engrère, along with Groh and Giroud-Triozon, agreed to participate in a charity exhibition of classical art in the gallery on Boulevard Bon-Nouvelle, it was to replenish the funds of the Society of Artists. The exhibition began with David, Engres was represented by 11 canvases, including The Great Odalisque, Stratonique, Odalisque with a Slave, and several portraits. The exhibition had a resonance, Baudelaire published his review, in which he paid special attention to the works of Ingres. Baudelaire wrote that the portraits of the master approached the ideal of personality, in addition, special mention was made of the richness and sophistication of his palette.

The revolution of 1848 in France, like the events of 1830, left Ingres unconcerned. On the contrary, it is 1848 that is signed by one of the artist”s most famous works, Venus of Anadiomena. He began this painting back in 1808, during a retirement trip to Rome, this kind of work was part of the artist”s obligatory report, as it was supposed to demonstrate his skill in depicting the nude. Venus is mentioned in correspondence in 1821 and 1823, but was never finished. The fact that the 68-year-old master returned to this image again and completed it in revolutionary times, perhaps testifies to the artist”s desire to contrast the conflicts of modernity with the eternal ideal of beauty and harmony. Engré himself noted that he saw “modeling by light” as the main thing in the painting. The body and face of the goddess correspond to the detached and calmly serene Engres ideal. The cupids give the impression of bustle, but give the composition stability, serving as a pedestal for the main figure. Contemporaries appreciated the painting, with Theophile Gautier haughtily stating that “this is what Apelles” creation could have looked like.” Gary Tinterow, however, noted that this style now looks kitsch.

The composition of Venus was used in another famous painting by Ingres – The Source. And this painting was painted for a long time: begun in Florence in 1820, it was completed only 36 years later. The painting was dedicated to the search for an unattainable ideal, and the image of a girl with a vessel pouring water is traditional for European art and has a symbolic meaning. Femininity is associated with pouring water – both mean the beginning of life. Compared with “Venus Anadimena” the composition of “The Source” is more statuarial, the contours of the figure are sharper, but less lively and the facial expression is sweeter. According to A. Bonfante-Warren, “this canvas is the most fully embodied features of his style, the ability to translate reality into images of ideal beauty. In this case, the virtuoso idealism of Ingres could not be better suited to his chosen subject. Since the painting was claimed by five collectors, Ingres arranged an auction. The painting went to Count Charles-Marie Tanguy Duchâtel for 25,000 francs.

No less time was spent working on the grandiose multi-figure oil painting at the Château de Dampierre, commissioned by the Comte de Ligne back in 1830. The artist thought out the plan in detail and settled with his wife in Dampier. In 1843, he wrote:

I want to portray the Golden Age as the ancient poets imagined it. The people of that generation did not know old age. They were kind, fair and loved one another. Their only food was the fruit of the earth and the water of springs, milk and nectar. They lived this way and died falling asleep; then they turned into good geniuses who cared for people…

The composition of the Golden Age was inspired by Raphael”s frescoes at the Vatican – strictly organized and with a semicircular ending. The left part was dedicated to Spring and Justice, the central part, with a ritual roundelay, to Summer and Peace; Autumn and reunion with the earth was shown on the right – half-lounging couples and families in love. The landscape also emphasized idealized pictures of an earthly paradise – it was ethereal, Poussin-like in spirit. Between 1845 and 1846, Engrère went very far in his work and even agreed to paint a paired composition, The Iron Age. For an unknown reason, he interrupted the painting in the fall of 1847 and terminated the contract in early 1850. Only in 1862, he created an easel, a scaled-down version of “The Golden Age,” with preparatory materials for it “striking expression and boldness of generalization.

On July 27, 1849 Engré”s wife Madeleine died as a result of an unsuccessful tooth extraction and subsequent blood poisoning. Engrère took this loss very hard, shut himself up in his apartment and could not work at all for the entire second half of 1849. Only in April 1852, after nearly three years of widowhood, the artist married the niece of his old friend Marcotte – Delphine Romel (she was also the sister of the wife of his son Cherubini – Salvatore). The artist was 71 years old and his chosen one was 43. The new marriage was successful: Delphine Romel was an old maid who lived with elderly parents, she surrounded Engrère care, in the words of G. Tinterow – “bourgeois comfort. Romelais also had a country estate in Menges-sur-Loire, where the family spent a lot of time. Engres expressed his gratitude in several portraits of his wife and her parents.

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Historical and portrait painting of the 1850s-1860s

The historical painting of the last period of Ingres is the least original in his legacy. One of the main commissions of the historical genre for Ingres was the plafond of the Paris City Hall on the theme “The Apotheosis of Napoleon. Cabanel and Delacroix were also commissioned to paint the town hall at that time. The 73-year-old Engres was no longer able to work on such a large painting by himself, and his pupils – brothers Rémon and Paul Balza, Paul Flandren, Alexandre Degoff and others – painted the plafond by his sketches. The work took place in the studio of the painter Gatto, a friend of Engré, who had a large, light-flooded hall. On 31 January 1854, the new Emperor Napoleon III visited Gatto”s studio, and he showered Engré with compliments. The Emperor particularly liked the dedicatory inscription: In nepote redivivus (He lives again in his nephew). However, in May 1871 the mural was lost in a fire during the Paris Commune, and only a small sketch has survived. Judging by this sketch, the composition was devoid of monumentality and eclectic, revealing direct borrowings from ancient monuments, which are not too related to each other. Delacroix, who examined the work, described his impressions as follows:

The proportions of his plafond are utterly impossible; he has not calculated the angles that are obtained in the figures, depending on the slope of the ceiling. The emptiness of the whole lower part of the picture is unbearable, and the whole monotonously bare azure in which his horses, also naked, float, with this naked emperor and his chariot dragged through the air, gives to the soul and to the eye of the viewer the impression of complete disharmony. The figures in caissons are the weakest thing he has ever done; clumsiness takes over all the qualities of this man. The pretension and clumsiness combined with a certain subtlety of detail, which has its own charm, seems to be all that remains of him for our descendants.

At the World Exhibition of 1855, 66 canvases by Ingres were exhibited, including the newly painted Joan of Arc at the Coronation of Charles VII in Rheims Cathedral on July 17, 1429, the Apotheosis of Napoleon, the Madonna with Communion, and many others. Hingre was the only artist who was honored with an individual pavilion, for he was seen by the plan of the exhibition as a key figure in promoting the superiority of French art. And this time, too, Engrère confronted Delacroix, for for his contemporaries their creative incompatibility was undeniable. Their “war” did not end until July 1857, when Delacroix was finally elected a full member of the Academy of Fine Arts to replace the deceased Paul Delaroche, with whom Hingre had also quarreled at one time.

Joan of Arc at the Coronation of Charles VII meticulously reproduces the details of the setting, the armor, and the historical garments, all rendered in a dry, rigid manner. Joan is portrayed as a classical beauty, her pose majestic and even pathetic, but her facial expressions are rather artificial. The dryness of the execution is tempered by the harmony of the color scheme – the silvery sheen of her armor and Jeanne”s pinkish skirt. Among the figures behind her stands out the squire, whom Engrère has given self-portrait features. N. Wolf noted that the monumentality of the image of the heroine is emphasized by the dark background, but the usual elegance of Ingres lines is lost because of the epic scope.

Among the portraits painted by Ingres during this period, the portrait of the Countess Louise d”Aussonville stands out, which he himself called “desperately difficult” and painted for three years (1842-1845). The heroine of the portrait was an extraordinary lady – in the future she wrote a famous biography of Byron and was married to a famous diplomat. Engres wanted to fully convey the grace of the 24-year-old heroine and found a complex compositional solution – the figure is reflected in the mirror behind her back in a shaky silhouette. The coloring corresponds to the refinement and grace of the model – the dress is done in bluish-silver shades, which are set off by the blue tone of the tablecloth on the table in front of the mirror.

Another famous work by Ingres was Portrait of Princess Pauline de Broglie (1853). The dominant color and composition of this portrait is the blue satin dress, which defines the elegance of the model and emphasizes her aristocratism. Many preparatory drawings have survived with various angles of composition, including the nude figure for which the hired sitter posed. Engré needed a whimsical and at the same time relaxed pose, he spent a long time looking for a general outline of the figure, calculated the position of the hands. This portrait, like most of the portraits of the later period, was unanimously praised by Engré”s contemporaries and contemporary art critics.

“H. Tinterow called the painting The Turkish Bath “one of a kind. This work, made at the age of 82 years, summed up many years of research Engres in the genre of nudes. The shape of the tondo allowed an intricate arabesque of female bodies to be woven, and the rounded volumes build up a spherical space. Placed among the figures are numerous reminiscences of Ingres”s own works, including Walpinson”s Bathing Woman (foreground), Angelique and Odalisques. Kenneth Clark speaks of the almost “suffocating” impression the painting makes:

“The artist finally allowed himself to let his senses run wild, and everything that was indirectly expressed by the hand of Tetia or the foot of Odalisque now found open embodiment in lush thighs, breasts, and luxuriant voluptuous poses.”

The repetition of the “Bathing Lady” sets up undulating lines, which are accentuated in the composition by the few standing figures. Engrère seemed to have returned to the methods of his youth, treating perspective and proportional relations quite freely. Neutral hues dominate the coloring: the naked bodies are golden, they are set off by patches of blue, yellow and red. The structurally complex still life in the foreground is also executed in these tones. The preparatory drawings for The Turkish Bath have survived and show how deeply Ingres interpreted nature, and then changed it to suit his purpose. Nevertheless, the few contemporaries who were able to see the painting perceived it as “pornographic” (although you can find a hint of a lesbian scene there if you wish). N. Wolf has noted that this work illustrates the thematic opposition between Ingres and Delacroix, with The Turkish Bath reproducing Western “harem clichés and fantasies. At the same time, using classicist stylization, Ingres did not descend into kitsch, as in similarly themed canvases by Troyer or Jerome. The general public could see the painting only at the beginning of the 20th century.

Also read, biographies – Nikos Kavvadias

The last years. The demise of

At the end of his life, all the aspirations of Ingres were turned to the past. This manifested itself in the creation of many compositions that copied earlier, particularly beloved works. He rewrote The Apotheosis of Homer, vainly hoping that this painting would become canonical for future generations; he wrote two repetitions of The Stratonica and a watercolor version of The Dream of Ossian. In 1864 he re-wrote Oedipus. According to V. Razdolskaya, “not all of them are superior in quality to the earlier versions, but in working on them, Engré obeyed that desire for perfection, which was the impetus of his entire creative life. His last painting, the eighth version of Madonna with Communion, is symbolically dated December 31, 1866.

On January 8, 1867, the 86-year-old artist went to the National Library, where he copied Giotto”s The Submission to the Coffin (from a reproduction). In the evening, friends arranged a musical evening with quartets by Mozart and Cherubini. Returning home after dinner, Engres caught a cold. His ailment turned into pneumonia, from which he died on January 14.

An officer of the Legion of Honor was entitled to a state funeral and his last resting place is in the Père-Lachaise cemetery. The tombstone was made in 1868 by a Roman student of Ingres, the sculptor Victor Baltar. Shortly before his death, the artist wrote a will in which all his possessions and works of art he bequeathed to his native Montauban, where it was to open a museum in his memory. In all, more than 4,000 works of art went there, an Engré”s chair and bureau, his violin and the gold wreath he was crowned with when he was appointed senator. The museum was opened in 1869 in the former bishop”s palace, built in the 17th century, and exhibits works by Ingres and his father.

On April 10, 1867, a retrospective exhibition of Ingres opened at the École des Beaux-Arts to coincide with the Universal Exhibition. Contemporaries felt a certain discomfort in comparing Paris, completely rebuilt by Baron Haussmann, and the pictorial heritage of Ingres, who copied Renaissance models and called for “Back to Raphael!” This same exhibition, however, was the first to show the sketches and sketches of Ingres, which allowed a new generation of critics to proclaim him a genius. Albert Wolf, who covered Impressionist exhibitions in the 1870s, wrote that the Ingres retrospective was a “revelation” for him, since the works and sketches, unknown to the general public, far surpassed the artist”s widely publicized creations.

The reconstruction of Engré”s personality and its perception is very difficult because his personal views and preferences differed from those declared. Engres had no literary talent, he did not write programmatic texts, replacing them with public statements and his own works. Nevertheless, from 1806 he kept a diary in which he interspersed his own judgments with extracts from books he had read, drafts of letters, descriptions of realized and unrealized ideas. Ten of Ingres”s notebooks have survived, nine of which are preserved in the Montauban Museum. Most of the judgments on art and method are contained in the ninth notebook. Engré”s diaries served as the main source for the biography of Henri Delaborde, published in 1870. In 1962, much of the material in the ninth notebook, with additions from the critical literature of the time, was published in Russian translation. Throughout his life, Engré corresponded with friends, especially Gillibert, but the originals of his letters have not survived. The materials of his correspondence were published in 1909 by Boyer d”Ajan, and this edition still serves as an important source for the study of the artist”s inner world; a reprint followed in 1926. Material from Engré”s notebooks was published in 1947 and 1994. In 1870 a book about the teacher was published by his student Amaury-Duval, mainly episodes from his life and a variety of anecdotes, which allow to a certain extent to correct the categorical nature of his own statements.

Early formed as a personality and as an artist (even before his twenties), Engrère had a capricious and irritable character. He loved to preach, but at the same time, if he heard his own ideas from the lips of others, he would become enraged, because he was not at all sure of the correctness of the doctrines he himself was preaching. On the basis of Engré”s program, he appeared as a man of certain tastes: the most beautiful of flowers – roses, the most beautiful of birds – the eagle, the greatest sculptor – Phidias, the composer – Mozart – etc. The greater contrast is created by diary statements, where Engrère argued that “at the origins of art is a lot of unformed, but it conceals more perfection than the most completed art. A. Isergina wrote the following on this subject:

“Where might Engres have encountered the unusual “origins of art” of some perhaps primitive cultures in which he was able to sense new possibilities for inspiration? Engres does not talk about it. And in general we can only speculate that if so many “heretical deviations” he put into words, how many things that fascinated and excited him he was silent about.

Engres” attitude to Oriental art is also unclear. In Paris and Naples he was interested in the art of China; the biography of Amaury-Duval describes an episode when Ingres communicated with an expert in Persia (possibly Gobino), who spoke of the peculiar charm of Persian music, the opposite of European music in its rhythm and structure. Engrère became alarmed and depressed because he could not say unequivocally whether “the Persians were fooled” or “the Europeans were fooled by Gluck, Mozart, and Beethoven.

Engré openly called himself a genius and wrote frankly as early as 1806 that he was “tormented by a thirst for fame. These statements are quite typical for the era of the turn of the XVIII-XIX centuries, when in the artistic environment existed the idea of the supreme mission of the artist, which is opposed to the views of the Romantics that the fate of a true genius – loneliness and misunderstanding. At the end of his life, Engrère admitted that he would like to get away from people and live in silence among his beloved affections, and this meant that he was experiencing an internal conflict typical of the 19th century artist. In this regard, in the twentieth century the confrontation between Ingres and Delacroix, which in the 1830s and 1860s was perceived as almost a major factor in French artistic life, is viewed very differently. From a historical perspective, the main reasons for their conflict (the primacy of color or line) became secondary, and after the publication of Delacroix”s diaries and Ingres” notes it became clear that their views on modernity, principles of analysis of works of art and approaches to their creation are almost entirely the same.

By the end of his life, Ingres was consistently subordinating his art and his personal tastes to the declared classicist doctrine. Considering himself a historical painter, Ingres could spend years finishing gigantic canvases, claiming that he was fulfilling a great mission. He wrote to Gillibert in 1821 about his graphic works and sketches that they could not be regarded as final and that he recognized only finished results in art. However, Amaury-Duval, in preparation for the 1855 World”s Fair, asked the master to place drawings under his major works, and Engrère suddenly replied, “No, why then; for then everyone would only look at them.”

Performing the role of a genius and receiving recognition only after his 50th birthday, Ingres was often unbearable for those around him. There is a famous anecdote when he came to a theater where there were no seats available and unceremoniously threw a young man out, telling him that “Monsieur Engres” himself (the young man was Anatole France) wanted to sit in that seat. He also declared that his influence on his pupils was so good that it could not be better, for his doctrines were irrefutable. Behind his outward self-confidence lied endless depression and self-injury, clearly visible in his letters to friends. In one of his letters to Gillibert, Engrère wrote:

It is not my shadow, it is myself, Engr… as I have always been, with all my imperfections, the sickness of my character, a failed man, incomplete, happy, unhappy, endowed with an abundance of qualities from which I have never had any use.

Almost all the major works of Ingres remain in France in the collections of the country”s major museums, especially the Louvre and the Ingres Museum in Montauban. Outside France, the largest collection of Ingres is in museums in the United States. In Russia only a few works of Ingres are kept – the original version of “Madonna before the Cup of Communion” (State Museum of Fine Arts) and “Portrait of Count Guriev” (State Hermitage). About seven-eighths of his heritage are graphic works, 455 portraits alone have survived. Art historians are virtually unanimous in saying that Engré”s greatest strength as a painter (and that of his teacher David) is the art of the portrait, an opinion that has held sway since the 1855 World”s Fair.

Engré”s style and technique were formed in his early youth and changed little during his life. In accordance with classicist technique, Ingres did not recognize visible strokes, painted “smoothly”, as well as did not recognize the mixing of colors, which was actively used by the Romantic painters. He preferred to use intense spots of color and halftones. This technique was most suitable for portraits and small canvases with two or three characters, but in monumental paintings it always made it impossible to combine many figures into a single composition. N.A. Dmitrieva even asserted that “Ingres” works are not picturesque, color is consciously assigned a secondary role … and there are no light and shade effects. She also compared Ingres” best works, including portraits, to bas-reliefs “with delicate transitions of form. According to Norbert Wolff, of all the students and followers of David, it is Engres in the most pure form preserved the classicist approach. Like N. A. Dmitrieva, Wolf noted that “Ingres worshipped the superiority of the line and cold colors. However, in his oriental and some mythological works, created under the influence of the Romantics, “the melody of the line is replaced by a more sensual color. According to N. Wolf, the best works of Ingres are dominated by figures with clearly outlined contours, which is emphasized by a sharp, “not atmospheric” lighting. Sometimes the impression is created that “the hands of the characters are drawn to the Roman portrait busts.

Engrère was a good teacher and most of his students became prominent representatives of the salon-academic trend; the most famous of them are Paul Balzs, Eugène-Emmanuel Amaury-Duval, Armand Cambon and Hippolyte Flandren, author of large decorative cycles in Parisian churches. Theodore Chasseriot, who had studied with him since 1830, is recognized as the most original of Engré”s pupils. It is no coincidence that he was later strongly influenced by Delacroix, after which his teacher abandoned him. Chasseriot was the only student of Ingres who developed into a vivid individuality.

Outside France, Ingres had a certain influence on Victorian painting, partly indirectly through Delaroche. In British art criticism, Engrère”s works are classified as part of le style troubadour, which is characterized by its attention to the intimate side of the lives of historical characters. Frederic Leighton, who visited the World”s Fair and communicated with Engrère, joined this movement in 1855. The influence is evident in the painting “Kimon and Iphigenia,” which reproduced the style of the oriental works of Ingres.

Engres” interpretation of the nude genre traditionally occupies a special place in art criticism. The morality of the Salon and its bourgeois visitors, which had always angered Ingres, recognized the depiction of the nude body only in mythological subjects and oriental motifs. In this respect Cabanel, in his Birth of Venus, directly polemicized with Ingres in full formal conformity with the canon. Christopher Wood noted that Engrère”s stylistic findings in the nude genre were extremely well received in Britain because they also fit into the Victorian morality. His English followers sought to transform the classicist statuarial “insensibility” into “deindividualization,” in other words, they sought to “de-psychologize” the female body and turn it into an “erotic principle per se.

Н. A. Dmitrieva characterized Ingres” works with nudes in this way:

Engres” singing lines, the flexible contours of women”s bodies, visibly deformed, exquisitely elongated, pampered, are in fact not reminiscent of Raphael. This is a very modernized classic: contrary to his wishes, Engrère belonged to his century, which he disowned. He wanted to paint in the old way, but felt in the modern way.

The influence of Ingres on the development of French art of subsequent generations was great, beginning with Degas, who in his early works was very close to him. According to N.A. Dmitrieva, “whenever French art begins to yearn for lost clarity, it recalls Ingres. A striking example is the “Enghr period” of one of the leading representatives of impressionism – Auguste Renoir, which came in the 1880s. The most famous work of this period – “The big bathers” (the lines of drawing have become clear and defined, the colors lost their former brightness and richness, painting in general began to look restrained and colder.

Among the admirers of Ingres in the twentieth century were Matisse and Picasso. Henri Matisse called Engres “the first artist who used pure colors, delimiting them instead of mixing them. Pablo Picasso also singled out the “Engres” period in his work, immediately after World War I. Barnett Newman, with his characteristic paradoxicalism, defined Engré as the founder of abstract expressionism.

Engrère”s passion for the violin led to the emergence in French of the French expression “violin d”Ingres” (fr. violon d”Ingres), meaning “the weakness of a famous man”, “a passion”. It was popularized by Romain Rolland:

In Rome, Hébert studied with Gounod, and they became close friends. The old artist had his own horse, the same as Ingres, the violin, but alas, he played falsely.

Sources

1. Энгр, Жан Огюст Доминик
2. Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres