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HAROLD B. LEE LIP r
BRIGHAM YOUNG u ,
PROVO, UTAH
Digitized by the Internet Archive
in 2013
http://archive.org/details/ingresOOingr
NEWNES'ART
a LIBRARY
INGRES
NGRES
THE LIBRARY
BRIGHAM YOUNG UNiVERSITY
PROVO, UTAH
CONTENTS
Page
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres: Painter. By Octave Uzanne.
Helen Chisholm ... Translated by
VII
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
La Source
The Turkish Bath
............ Frontispiece
Madame
Duke
la .........
Stratonice (First Version)
Comtesse D'Haussonville
Son of Louis- Philippe
of Orleans,
6
7
8
Napoleon Bonaparte, " First Consul " q
The Odalisque IO
Madame de Sesonnes n
Venus Anadyomene .12
Study for the Figure in the Muse of Cherubini 1 3
M. Cordier 14
Virgil reading the yEneid (Fragment) i$
Lorenzo Bartolini (Florentine Sculptor) : 6
Virgin and Child ,
17
The Odalisque and
L. Cherubini ..............
Sleeping Infant (Study)
the Slave 18
iq
20
CEdipus and the Sphinx 21
Madame Riviere 22
Sketch for the Painting in Sistine Chapel 23
Virgin and the Sacred Host 24
Ceremony in the Sistine Chapel 25
Francesca Da Rimini and Paolo Malatesta 26
M. De Belveze de Montauban 27
Portrait of Lady (unknown) surnamed La Belle Zelie 28
Charles X 29
v b
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS continued
Page
Virgin and the Sacred Host (Second Version) 30
The Painter's Second Wife (Miss Delphine Rameh) 31
Louis Mathieu Mole, Pair de France 32
Christ committing to Peter the Keys of Paradise , 33
The Bather 34
Rogero delivering Angelica 35
Rogero delivering Angelica (Detail) 36
The Painter's Father 37
M. Rochet 38
M. Philibert Riviere 39
Jeanne D'Arc 40
Christ before the Doctors 41
Portrait of the Painter 42
Stratonice (Second Version) 43
Portrait of Garnet 44
The Chapel
Sistine 45
M. Bertin L'Aine 46
Madame Delauzat and her Son (Study) 47
Marshal of Berwick receiving the Gold Chain from Philippe V 48
Cartoon for Window
St. Anthony
St. Francis
.............. 49
50
51
St. Camilla 52
St. Charles 53
St. Amelia 54
St.
St.
St.
Ferdinand
Ludovic
Helena
.............. 55
56
57
Decorative Painting " L'Age D'Or " 58
Decorative Painting (Detail) 59
Jupiter and Thetis 60
The Deification of Homer (Detail) 61
The Deification of Homer (Detail) 62
Virgin and Child (Detail from the Vow of Louis XIII.) 63
The Deification of Homer (Detail) 64
JEAN-AUGUSTE-DOMINIQUE
INGRES: PAINTER
BY OCTAVE UZANNE
TRANSLATED BY HELEN CHISHOLM
the painting looks heavy and as if enamelled. Carle Vernet, who saw this
JEAN-AUGUSTE-DOMINIQUE INGRES
picture, important in size alone, at the Salon of 1806, without a thought
of malice let fall the quite fair witticism :"C'est malingre " It is indeed
!
" unhealthy," with its over-emphasis of the imperial character, its exces-
sive care for detail, and its need of reconciling so many different sources
of interest.
These official commissions served at least one good purpose in pro-
viding the impecunious artist with a free lodging in Paris at the ancient
convent of the Capuchins, then turned into separate studios, where A. J.
Gros, the Napoleonic painter, was also housed. This latter's vast apart-
ment was filled with military, oriental, and decorative bric-a-brac
necessary storehouse of accessories, destined for use in the grand epic
scenes which were to commemorate the glories of the Egyptian cam-
paign in illustrative paintings by the hand that gave us " La Bataille
d'Aboukir."
Towards the end of 1806 the Ministry of Fine Arts was at last able to
supply the young prize-winner of 1801 with the money requisite for his
journey to Italy, and to pay for his board and lodging at the Villa Medici.
Ingres joyfully took his departure for the land of the great masters, whose
works he had so long yearned to behold. No sooner had he arrived in
the Sacred City than he felt seized by a frantic ardour for work. The
draughtsman's pencil was never out of his hand, and graphic notes were
taken of monuments, mausoleums, accessories of religious art, furniture,
civil, military, and monastic costumes, armoury, and architectural details
in the churches. He neglected nothing which could yield him informa-
tion, while perfecting his vigorous and exact method of jotting down
detail. Among the mass of drawings preserved at Montauban some of
these well-filled little notebooks are still to be found, revealing the prodi-
gious extent of his labour.
He next made a passing visit to Florence and the smaller towns of
glorious Umbria. Above all he set himself to follow the footsteps of
Raphael, his deity that divine Sanzio who still influenced him in the
highest degree, and to whom he seems to have given his whole artistic
soul at first sight. Every artist was then choosing from among his more
illustrious predecessors some one master whose dominant influence
should be continually manifest in his work. Till then no one had thought
of electing Raphael as his patron saint Ingres was the first artist to
;
dedicate his entire aesthetic passion to this master. His friend Charles
Blanc remarks this. " By his kindling words," he writes, " by the avowal
of his imitations, by the lofty tone of his criticism, the ardent Montal-
banais substituted a well-considered enthusiasm for that foolish,
unreasoning, conventional admiration of which Raphael had been the
object in every school for three hundred years. He restored the cult of
Raphael, and had the more credit in so doing because he himself in no
way then personally resembled the great painter whom he adored. He who
was so impassioned, whose style was emotional to the verge of exaggera-
tion, strained and arbitrary almost to violence, was chanting the praises
JEAN-AUGUSTE-DOMINIQUE INGRES
of a genius that was measured in its grandiloquence, discreet in its fertile
abundance, temperate and human in its heroism, lofty without effort, and
serenely sublime."
By sending to the Beaux-Arts in Paris a copy of the Farnesine
Mercury as a specimen of his progress, the new student of the Academy
of France in Rome was evidently enrolling himself definitely under the
banner of his spiritual master, Raphael. The following year, 1808, after
having painted the wonderful portrait of Mme. Devangay, one of the
most marvellous of his achievements, he sent to Paris CEdipus explaining
the Riddle (now carefully preserved at the Louvre), which in the eyes of
connoisseurs bore eloquent testimony to his extraordinary powers of
composition, his faultless mastery of drawing, his admirable treatment
of a plastic subject, and his thorough comprehension of the ancient
legend.
The confident authority and penetration with which so young a
painter interpreted the genius of Greek art disconcerted Ingres' masters
and fellow pupils. Critics of the day sought to extol his qualities as a
draughtsman, while contemptuously disparaging him as a painter and
colourist. This was for long a received convention which considerably
influenced public opinion. Nothing, however, could discourage the
young neo-Raphaelite, too much absorbed in his study of the art-galleries
and in his own work to lend a ready ear to the rare echoes which reached
him in letters from friends in Paris.
Works sent from Rome and signed with the name of Ingres followed
one another in rapid succession. In 181 1 the artist sent his Jupiter and
Thetis (now in the Museum at Aix), a year later Romulus the Vanquisher of
Acron, and afterwards that beautiful scene from antiquity representing
Virgil Reading the Sixth Canto of the ALneid to Augustus and Octavia, the
principal rendering of which is now in the Brussels Museum,' while
admirable drawings by the master's hand for the same subject (the
most important is now at the Louvre) have been reproduced by every
process of engraving. About this same time that is, before his return
to Paris he executed some smaller pictures, such as Francesca da Rimini,
Raphael and the Fornarina, and The Entry of Charles V., which are not
without some affinity in subject and composition to the work of certain
romantic painters of a later date ; and this suggests that Ingres might well
have boasted of being the precursor of a school whose most determined
adherents combated his views with unexampled animosity. But, to tell
the truth, if he was the first apostle of the Romantic, he remained the last
supporter of the Classic.
Ingres had all this time to struggle with the indifference of his con-
temporaries, and in order to secure a modest provision for his material
necessities he was obliged to draw, and to sell for ridiculous prices, those
little pencil portraits which his fame has made so precious that nowadays
lovers of art bid against one another for their possession, and do not
grudge banknotes in paying for them. Towards the end of his life, when
xi
JEAN-AUGUSTE-DOMINIQUE INGRES
recalling those years of penury, Ingres declared that he had produced
more than three hundred of these pencil portraits for various foreigners
passing through Rome or temporarily settled there, and he calculated
that a maximum figure of 8000 francs would represent the entire sum
that he made by this modest work. Originally a finished pencil portrait by
Ingres was priced at about 40 francs for a " head and shoulders," or 60
for a full-length study. A cicerone of the town, a sort of guide-inter-
preter, who sometimes brought his temporary employers to have their
likenesses taken, received the fee of one crown for each introduction.
The artist, however, was very sensitive, and insisted on being treated with
much circumspection by his sitters. Somebody who called one day at
his lodging and asked familiarly, " The portrait-painter ? It's here,
isn't it?" had the door violently slammed in his face by Ingres, who
exclaimed haughtily u No, sir ; he who lives here has the honour of
:
wanted to set back art for several centuries and resuscitate the style of
John of Bruges."
Dominique Ingres continued all the while to hope for more justice
from his compatriots he was fond of quoting Beethoven, who when
;
the following year came Pietro Aretino and the Envoy of Charles V. ;
and later, from 1816 to 1819, appeared the Death of Leonardo da Vinci,
Roger and Angelica, Henri IV. and his Children, Philip V. giving the
Order of the Golden Fleece to the Marechal de Berwick after the Battle of
Almanza. He also painted portraits of M. Cortot the sculptor, M. Boyer,
and M. Granet the painter (the latter with that delightful view of Rome
in perspective as a background) of M. Paul Lemoine the sculptor,
;
" Yes, I may be accused of fanaticism about Raphaelism and the artists
of his age, but I shall never be modest save before Nature and their
masterpieces. Every step of progress in my career I owe solely to my
constant and profound study of those law-givers of art. Their successors
have taught me nothing but what is vicious, and what I have had to
forget." We see what an excessive contempt he had for modern
times !
xiv
JEAN-AUGUSTE-DOMINIQUE INGRES
In 1824 he who became known by the " the modern
name of
Raphael " at last
experienced almost undisputed success with the exhibi-
tion in the Paris Salon of his Vow of Louis XIII. for the Cathedral of
,
which at that time was held in the Salle Carree of the Louvre during the
foggy days of November, helped to allay his fears. The effect of his
picture was here seen to much better advantage the figure of the Virgin,
:
the light falling from above, the folds of the royal mantle everything
gained in harmony, and the general effect was quieter than in his
Florence studio in the Via delle belle Donne, where it had been
painted.
This was the young artist's second essay in religious painting. The
firstdated from 1820, and was the 'Jesus Christ giving St. Peter the Keys of
Paradise, which he had painted for the Church of the Trinita dei Monti
at Rome.
The Vow of Louis XIII., however questionable its merits may now
appear to us, helped to confirm the painter's reputation, and to give him
a definite footing on the road to distinction. From this time forward
Ingres, well started on his way to success, cherished hopes of entering the
Institute ; and on the death of Girodet in 1825 he was installed in the
place of the deceased. He now embarked upon a full-length portrait of
Charles X. ; he set up two studios, one in the little Rue des Marais St.
Germain, afterwards the Rue Visconti and he opened a school of art
;
entered the Senate without having needed to solicit this fresh distinction.
He died on January 14, 1867, at; No. 11 Quai Voltaire, where his widow
continued to reside up to the day of her death, which took place about
1895, and for a long while the rooms remained just as Ingres had had them
decorated. In his will he bequeathed to the town of Montauban more
than three thousand drawings and painted studies, his manuscript notes,
various valuable works, his violin, his books of music, the painted portrait
of Raphael as a young man, the portrait of his father, and many other
family treasures.
Such, then, is a succinct summary of the life of the French neo-
Raphael of the nineteenth century a man who sincerely believed that
:
the ideal in art is the "quintessence of truth," and that "style" should
JEAN-AUGUSTE-DOMINIQUE INGRES
be " human," in the sense in which the ancient gods and Greek
heroes typified the emotions of humanity in the Golden Age of the
world.
From 1840 to 1867 that is to say, in the latter part of the great
painter's life
his productivity in the matter of important pictures was
steadily maintained. I give a list of titles, which will complete the
enumeration made in the course of my sketch of the artist's life up to
his final return to Paris in 1841 :
refinement and breadth of its modelling, its delicate colouring, and its
perfection of form. It has been, perhaps, more popularised than any
other of the master's pictures. Etchings and engravings, as well as
lithographs and photographs, have reproduced it over and over again.
The beautiful form of the nude figure may seem to have been idealised
by the artist, but an unpublished anecdote tells us that when Ingres was
painting his first conception of the picture in his studio at No. u
Quai
Voltaire, he was in despair at not being able to find a model to please
him. His concierge, who did the work of his studio, seeing him so
cast down on this account, said to him timidly :
" Ah, Monsieur Ingres,
if I dared !" "Well, what?" "Monsieur Ingres, if I dared
propose my daughter to you ? She's sixteen, pretty and plump you ;
might take her as a model. Oh, of course the child would be a little
shy. But to serve you, Monsieur Ingres, she would do it willingly."
Ingres accepted. The figure of the little concierge was a masterpiece of
radiant grace. The old aesthete was dazzled by her beauty never, he
:
fact, analogous to the antique ideal, to which he has added the com-
plexities and minutiae of modern art. It is this combination which gives
his works their peculiar charm. Thus enamoured of an ideal which
xviii
JEAN-AUGUSTE-DOMINIQUE INGRES
unites in a seductive and adulterous bond the calm solidity of Raphael
with the studied refinements of a woman of fashion, M. Ingres should
be very successful in portraiture. It is indeed in this department that
he has achieved his greatest, his most legitimate triumph. He is not,
however, one of those painters by the hour to whom a vulgarian may go,
purse in hand, and ask for a reproduction of his uncomely person.
M. Ingres chooses his models ; he chooses them with wonderful tact
they are those best fitted to show off his special kind of talent. Beautiful
women, opulent natures, serene blooming health in these he delights
:
and triumphs.
" M. Ingres," continues Baudelaire, ''should be considered as a man
gifted with high qualities, an eloquent lover of beauty, but devoid of that
energetic temperament which is the fatality of genius. His leading pre-
occupations are a taste for the antique and respect for a school. In short,
admiration comes easy to him, and his mind is rather eclectic, as is the
case with all those who are lacking in fatality."
By the word "fatality" the author of " Petits Poemes en Prose"
meant to express the idea that Ingres was not one of those exceptional
forces of nature that pass across the firmament of art like a thunderbolt,
one of those temperaments calculated to bring the world new sensations :
not, that is to say, a great genius, astounding, superhuman. He cannot,
for instance
about this there is no doubt be compared to that marvel-
lous man, J. M. W. Turner, who arose so spontaneously, like a Napoleon
in the world of English painting, almost at the precise date when Ingres
was developing his talent slowly, dogmatically, and austerely, in the
classic groove of antiquity.
In French national art Ingres represents a sort of renascence of
Poussin's masculine beauty and Eustache Lesueur's strictly and nobly
graphic art. To relate him to those two masters is to award him a place
of very high esteem. If we turn for a perfect expression of Ingres'
mental attitude to his Notes et Pensees we shall find there a spirit of
erudition, a smack of the professor and dogmatist, rather than moral
independence or a cult of innate originality. He dreaded in art any
truth that was not authenticated by the testimony of the Italian masters,
above all by Raphael's. He looked for fundamental truths that were
based upon the experience of the ages everything else seemed to him
;
This quotation serves to show the rigorous doctrine and the intellectual
and aesthetic tendencies of Dominique Ingres. He was the apostle of
misoneism, the denier of new formulas or, as one might say, the engineer
;
JEAN-AUGUSTE-DOMINIQUE INGRES
of a stream of art narrowly confined within its banks from its source
to its present position, with no permissible deviation.
However we may criticise his ideas and opinions, we cannot but
respect them ; for they were strictly at one with his life, his unassailable
convictions, and his character instinct with dignified virtue. His genius
was essentially retrospective that is all one can say, without attaching to
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