Editing Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (section)

===Colour===
For Ingres, colour played an entirely secondary role in art. He wrote, "Colour adds ornament to a painting; but it is nothing but the handmaiden, because all it does is to render more agreeable the true perfections of the art. Rubens and Van Dyck can be pleasing at first sight, but they are deceptive; they are from the poor school of colourists, the school of deception. Never use bright colours, they are anti-historic. It is better to fall into gray than to into bright colours."{{Sfn|Jover|2005|pages=189–190}} The Institute in Paris complained in 1838 that the students of Ingres in Rome "had a deplorable lack of knowledge of the truth and power of colour, and a knowledge of the different effects of light. A dull and opaque effect is found in all their canvases. They seem to have only been lit by twilight." The poet and critic [[Baudelaire]] observed: "the students of M. Ingres have very uselessly avoided any semblance of colour; they believe or pretend to believe that they are not needed in painting."{{Sfn|Jover|2005|page=191}}

Ingres's own paintings vary considerably in their use of colour, and critics were apt to fault them as too grey or, contrarily, too jarring.<ref name="Ribiero_18">Ribeiro 1999, p. 18.</ref> Baudelaire—who said "M. Ingres adores colour like a fashionable milliner"—wrote of the portraits of Louis-François Bertin and Madame d'Haussonville: "Open your eyes, nation of simpletons, and tell us if you ever saw such dazzling, eye-catching painting, or even a greater elaboration of colour".<ref name="Ribiero_18"/> Ingres's paintings are often characterized by strong local colours, such as the "acid blues and bottle greens" [[Kenneth Clark]] professed to "perversely enjoy" in ''[[La Grande Odalisque]]''.<ref>Clark 1976, p. 121.</ref> In other works, especially in his less formal portraits such as the ''Mademoiselle Jeanne-Suzanne-Catherine Gonin'' (1821), colour is restrained.<ref name="Tinterow, Conisbee 1999, p. 300"/>