Editing Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (section)

==Style==
{{main|List of paintings by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres}}
[[File:Jean-Paul Flandrin - Odalisque with Slave - Walters 37887.jpg|left|thumb|''[[Odalisque with Slave]]'' (1842), oil on canvas, 76 x 105 cm, [[Walters Art Gallery]], [[Baltimore]]]]
Ingres's style was formed early in life and changed comparatively little.<ref>Arikha 1986, p. 5.</ref> His earliest drawings, such as the ''Portrait of a Man'' (or ''Portrait of an unknown'', 3&nbsp;July 1797, now in the Louvre<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://www.wikiart.org/en/jean-auguste-dominique-ingres/portrait-of-an-unknown-since-the-bust-left-profile|title=Portrait of an unknown, since the bust, left profile, 1797 – Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres |website=www.wikiart.org}}</ref>) already show a suavity of outline and an extraordinary control of the parallel hatchings which model the forms. From the first, his paintings are characterized by a firmness of outline reflecting his often-quoted conviction that "drawing is the probity of art".<ref>Prat 2004, p. 13.</ref> He believed colour to be no more than an accessory to drawing, explaining: "Drawing is not just reproducing contours, it is not just the line; drawing is also the expression, the inner form, the composition, the modelling. See what is left after that. Drawing is seven eighths of what makes up painting."<ref>Barousse et al. 1979, p. 5.</ref>

The art historian Jean Clay said Ingres "proceeded always from certitude to certitude, with the result that even his freest sketches reveal the same kind of execution as that found in the final works."<ref name="Clay_132">Clay 1981, p. 132.</ref> In depicting the human body he disregarded rules of anatomy—which he termed a "dreadful science that I cannot think of without disgust"—in his quest for a sinuous arabesque.<ref name="Clay_132"/> Abhorring the visible brushstroke, Ingres made no recourse to the shifting effects of colour and light on which the [[romanticism|Romantic]] school depended; he preferred local colours only faintly modelled in light by half tones. "Ce que l'on sait," he would repeat, "il faut le savoir l'épée à la main." ("Whatever you know, you must know it with sword in hand.") Ingres thus left himself without the means of producing the necessary unity of effect when dealing with crowded compositions, such as the ''Apotheosis of Homer'' and the ''Martyrdom of Saint Symphorian''. Among Ingres's historical and mythological paintings, the most satisfactory are usually those depicting one or two figures, such as ''Oedipus'', ''[[The Half-Length Bather]]'', ''Odalisque'', and ''The Spring'', subjects only animated by the consciousness of perfect physical well-being.<ref name=EB1911>{{EB1911 |wstitle=Ingres, Jean Auguste Dominique |inline=1 |volume=14 |pages=566–567}}</ref>

In ''[[Roger Freeing Angelica (Ingres)|Roger Freeing Angelica]]'', the female nude seems merely juxtaposed with the meticulously rendered but inert figure of Roger flying to the rescue on his [[hippogriff]],{{Sfn|Jover|2005|page=110}} for Ingres was rarely successful in the depiction of movement and drama. According to Sanford Schwartz, the "historical, mythological, and religious pictures bespeak huge amounts of energy and industry, but, conveying little palpable sense of inner tension, are costume dramas ... The faces in the history pictures are essentially those of models waiting for the session to be over. When an emotion is to be expressed, it comes across stridently, or woodenly."<ref>Schwartz 2006.</ref>

Ingres was averse to theories, and his allegiance to classicism—with its emphasis on the ideal, the generalized, and the regular—was tempered by his love of the particular.<ref>Arikha 1986, pp. 2–5.</ref> He believed that "the secret of beauty has to be found through truth. The ancients did not create, they did not make; they recognized."<ref>Arikha 1986, p. 2.</ref> In many of Ingres's works there is a collision between the idealized and the particular that creates what [[Robert Rosenblum]] termed an "oil-and-water sensation".<ref>Rosenblum 1985, p. 132.</ref> This contradiction is vivid in [[Luigi Cherubini and the Muse of Lyric Poetry|''Cherubini and the Muse of Lyric Poetry'']] (1842), for example, in which the realistically painted 81-year-old composer is attended by an idealized muse in classical drapery.<ref>Tinterow, Conisbee et al. 1999, pp. 7–8.</ref>

Ingres's choice of subjects reflected his literary tastes, which were severely limited: he read and reread [[Homer]], [[Virgil]], [[Plutarch]], [[Dante]], histories, and the lives of the artists.<ref name="Condon et al. 1983, p. 13"/> Throughout his life he revisited a small number of favourite themes, and painted multiple versions of many of his major compositions.<ref>Condon et al. 1983, pp. 12–13.</ref> He did not share his age's enthusiasm for battle scenes, and generally preferred to depict "moments of revelation or intimate decision manifested by meeting or confrontation, but never by violence."<ref>Condon et al. 1983, pp. 11–12.</ref> His numerous odalisque paintings were influenced to a great extent by the writings of [[Mary Wortley Montagu]], the wife of the ambassador to Turkey whose diaries and letters, when published, fascinated European society.<ref>{{cite magazine |magazine=[[Cornucopia (magazine)|Cornucopia]] |issue= 10 |url=http://www.cornucopia.net/highlights10full.html |title=Highlights}}</ref>

Although capable of painting quickly, he often laboured for years over a painting. Ingres's pupil [[Eugène Emmanuel Amaury-Duval|Amaury-Duval]] wrote of him: "With this facility of execution, one has trouble explaining why Ingres' oeuvre is not still larger, but he scraped out [his work] frequently, never being satisfied ... and perhaps this facility itself made him rework whatever dissatisfied him, certain that he had the power to repair the fault, and quickly, too."<ref>Condon et al. 1983, p. 11.</ref> Ingres's ''Venus Anadyomene'' was begun in 1807 but not completed until 1848, after a long hiatus resulting from his indecision about the position of the arms.<ref name="Condon_64"/> ''The Source'' (1856) had a similar history. It was begun in the 1820s as a sketch of "such simplicity that one would suppose she had been painted in a single stroke" according to Amaury-Duval, who believed that Ingres' reworking of the painting in 1855 was a loss.<ref>Radius 1968, p. 115.</ref><ref>Cohn and Siegfried 1980, p. 75.</ref>

===Portraits===
<gallery mode="packed" heights="150px">
Image:Ingres, Madame Riviere.jpg|''[[Portrait of Marie-Françoise Rivière]]'' (1805–06), oil on canvas, 116.5 x 81.7&nbsp;cm, [[Louvre]]
File:Ingres Marcotte d-Argenteuil.jpg|''[[Portrait of Charles Marcotte]]'' (1810), National Gallery of Art, Washington DC
File:Louis-Francois Bertin.jpg|''[[Portrait of Monsieur Bertin]]'' (1832), the Louvre
File:Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres - Comtesse d'Haussonville - Google Art Project.jpg|''[[Portrait of Comtesse d'Haussonville]]'' (1845), [[Frick Collection]], New York
Image:Jean auguste dominique ingres baronne james de rothschild.jpg|''[[Portrait of Baronne de Rothschild]]'' (1848), Rothschild Collection, Paris
</gallery>

While Ingres believed that history painting was the highest form of art, his modern reputation rests largely upon the exceptional quality of his portraits. By the time of his retrospective at the Exposition Universelle in 1855, an emerging consensus viewed his portrait paintings as his masterpieces.<ref>Tinterow, Conisbee et al. 1999, p. 512.</ref> Their consistently high quality belies Ingres's often-stated complaint that the demands of portraiture robbed him of time he could have spent painting historical subjects. [[Baudelaire]] called him "the sole man in France who truly makes portraits. The portraits of M. Bertin, M. Molé and Mme d'Haussonville are true portraits, that is, the ideal reconstruction of individuals....A good portrait seems to me always as a biography dramatized."<ref>Charles Baudelaire, ''Le Salon de 1859''</ref> His most famous portrait is that of Louis-François Bertin, the chief editor of the ''Journal des Debats'', which was widely admired when it was exhibited at the 1833 Salon. Ingres had originally planned to paint Bertin standing, but many hours of effort ended in a creative impasse before he decided on a seated pose. [[Édouard Manet]] described the resulting portrait as "The Buddha of the Bourgeoisie". The portrait quickly became a symbol of the rising economic and political power of Bertin's social class.<ref name="Tinterow, Conisbee 1999, p. 300">Tinterow, Conisbee et al. 1999, p. 300.</ref>

For his female portraits, he often posed the subject after a classical statue; the famous portrait of the Comtesse de'Haussonville may have been modeled after a Roman statue called "Pudicity" ("modesty") in the Vatican collection.<ref>Russell, John. "[https://www.nytimes.com/1985/11/24/arts/art-view-ingres-s-portrait-of-a-lady-is-the-mirror-of-an-age.html Ingres's Portrait of a Lady is the Mirror of an Age"], ''The New York Times'', 24 November 1985. Retrieved 8 July 2017.</ref> Another trick that Ingres used was to paint the fabrics and details in the portraits with extreme precision and accuracy, but to idealize the face. The eye of the viewer would perceive the fabrics as realistic and would assume the face was equally true.{{Sfn|Jover|2005|pages=222–223}} His portraits of women range from the warmly sensuous ''Madame de Senonnes'' (1814) to the realistic ''Mademoiselle Jeanne Gonin'' (1821), the [[Juno (mythology)|Juno]]esque ''Marie-Clothilde-Inés de Foucauld, Madame Moitessier'' (portrayed standing and seated, 1851 and 1856), and the chilly ''Joséphine-Eléonore-Marie-Pauline de Galard de Brassac de Béarn, Princesse de Broglie'' (1853).

===Drawings===
<gallery mode="packed" heights="150px">
File:Ingres Study for La Grande Odalisque 1814.jpg|Study for the ''[[Grande Odalisque]]'' (1814)
File:NiccoloPaganini.jpeg|The violinist [[Niccolo Paganini]] (1819)
File:Vicomtess Othenin d'Haussonville, nee Louise Albertine de Broglie, study.jpg|Study for the portrait of the Vicomtesse d'Haussonville (circa 1844)
File:Ingres Etude Bain Turc Louvre 1859.jpg|Study for ''[[The Turkish Bath]]'' (1859)
</gallery>

Drawing was the foundation of Ingres's art. In the Ecole des Beaux-Arts he excelled at figure drawing, winning the top prizes. During his years in Rome and Florence, he made hundreds of drawings of family, friends, and visitors, many of them of very high portrait quality. He never began a painting without first resolving the drawing, usually with a long series of drawing in which he refined the composition. In the case of his large history paintings, each figure in the painting was the subject of numerous sketches and studies as he tried different poses. He demanded that his students at the Academy and the Ecole des Beaux-Arts perfect their drawing before anything else; he declared that a "thing well drawn is always a thing well painted".<ref>King, Edward S. (1942). "Ingres as Classicist". ''The Journal of the Walters Art Gallery'' '''20''': 68–113.</ref>

[[File:Ingres - Mme Victor Baltard & sa fille Paule.jpg|thumb|upright|''Mme Victor Baltard and Her Daughter, Paule'', 1836, pencil on paper, 30.1 x 22.3&nbsp;cm]]
His portrait drawings, of which about 450 are extant,<ref>Ribeiro 1999, p. 47.</ref> are today among his most admired works. While a disproportionate number of them date from his difficult early years in Italy, he continued to produce portrait drawings of his friends until the end of his life. [[Agnes Mongan]] has written of the portrait drawings:<blockquote>Before his departure in the fall of 1806 from Paris for Rome, the familiar characteristics of his drawing style were well established, the delicate yet firm contour, the definite yet discreet distortions of form, the almost uncanny capacity to seize a likeness in the precise yet lively delineation of features.</blockquote><blockquote>The preferred materials were also already established: the sharply pointed graphite pencil on a smooth white paper. So familiar to us are both the materials and the manner that we forget how extraordinary they must have seemed at the time&nbsp;... Ingres' manner of drawing was as new as the century. It was immediately recognized as expert and admirable. If his paintings were sternly criticized as "Gothic," no comparable criticism was leveled at his drawings.<ref>Mongan and Naef 1967, p. xiii.</ref></blockquote>

His student [[Raymond Balze]] described Ingres's working routine in executing his portrait drawings, each of which required four hours, as "an hour and a half in the morning, then two-and-a-half hours in the afternoon, he very rarely retouched it the next day. He often told me that he got the essence of the portrait while lunching with the model who, off guard, became more natural."<ref>Arikha 1986, p. 6.</ref> The resulting drawings, according to [[John Canaday]], revealed the sitters' personalities by means so subtle—and so free of cruelty—that Ingres could "expose the vanities of a fop, a silly woman, or a windbag, in drawings that delighted them."<ref>Canaday 1969, p. 814.</ref>

Ingres drew his portrait drawings on [[wove paper]], which provided a smooth surface very different from the ribbed surface of [[laid paper]] (which is, nevertheless, sometimes referred to today as "[[Ingres paper]]").<ref>Mongan and Naef 1967, p. 244.</ref> The early drawings are characterized by very taut contours drawn with sharply pointed graphite, while later drawings show freer lines and more emphatic modeling, drawn with a softer, blunter graphite.<ref>Mongan and Naef 1967, p. xxii.</ref>

Drawings made in preparation for paintings, such as the many studies for ''The Martyrdom of St. Symphorian'' and ''The Golden Age'', are more varied in size and treatment than are the portrait drawings. It was his usual practice to make many drawings of nude models, in search of the most eloquent gesture, before making another series of drawings for the draperies. In his early years he sometimes had his model pose behind a translucent veil that suppressed details and emphasized the arabesque.<ref>Arikha 1986, p. 48.</ref> He often used female models when testing poses for male figures, as he did in drawings for ''Jesus Among the Doctors''.<ref>Arikha 1986, p. 91.</ref> Nude studies exist even for some of his commissioned portraits, but these were drawn using hired models.<ref>Tinterow, Conisbee et al. 1999, pp. 432, 449.</ref>

Ingres drew a number of [[Landscape art|landscape]] views while in Rome, but he painted only one pure landscape, the small tondo ''Raphael's Casino'' (although two other small landscape tondos are sometimes attributed to him).<ref>Arikha 1986, p. 1.</ref>

===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"/>