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 Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres was born on August 29, 1780, the son of a house decorator, painter and sculptor of Montauban, France. At the age of nine he was already turning out drawings of astonishing maturity. His father taught him the rudiments of painting and drawing and made him learn the violin. He studied painting under several local instructors at the Academy in Toulouse; he also played the violin in the orchestra there and was for a time tempted to renounce painting in favor of music. But his teachers foresaw a successful career for him and encouraged him to follow his artistic bent.
He went to Paris at the age of seventeen to study with the great neo-classic painter David, whose style was based on antique art. Ingres rebelled against David's rigidity. In 1799, Ingres was accepted as a student by the Painting Department of the School of Beaux Arts, where he distinguished himself and won the Grand Prix de Rome in 1801. The prize entitled him to four years of study in Rome at the French Academy; but the government's financial difficulties made it impossible for Ingres to make the trip until 1806.
He then went off to Italy to develop further a style of his own, based on nature and governed by a lyrical feeling for the beauty of line. The works he produced were so abused by David's followers in France that for eighteen years Ingres stayed away from his native land, eking out a bare living painting portraits and making hundreds of fine-lined drawings of society notables. These exquisite sketches, tossed off as potboilers, are now numbered among the artist's masterpieces.
From 1820 to 1824 he lived in Florence, Italy; by 1824 he had begun to win recognition in France, and he returned to Paris that year. There he opened a studio for students and became the official leader of the Classicists against the Romanticists. In 1834 he quit Paris and accepted the directorship of the French School at Rome, an office which he filled for seven years.
Ingres was short, olive-skinned, with large brown eyes - not unlike the young Picasso. From the start, he seemed destined for the arts. His education was scanty and throughout his life he was embarassed by his lack of culture. Nonetheless, he spent much time copying Greek vases or tracing them from books of engravings. Archaic art allowed Ingres to release his natural gifts, his sense of precise and intricate pattern, the cameo-like completeness of his design.
In 1813 he had taken a wife, which he did very simply by ordering her by mail. Her name was Madeleine Chapelle and she came sight unseen from northern France to marry Ingres in Rome on the recommendation of a cousin. This deliberate method succeeded, and the marriage, though childless, was long and happy. In 1820 Ingres moved with his wife to Florence, where he stayed for four years.
Ingres was generally considered the model of classic art. As the high priest of tradition, he himself really believed that he was of the elect. He felt so possessed by a higher power that he used to refer to himself in the third person, as Monsieur Ingres, even in his love letters. During his lifetime he built himself up as a little god of orthodoxy. He stumped out of exhibitions if they contained romantic pictures; he was a repressive director of the French Academy in Rome; and if one of his followers showed any sign of spirit, he would cry "Traitre!"
Ingres sketched incessantly: friends, neighbors, nudes. While in Italy as a young man, he amused himself playing fiddle with a friendly foursome that Paganini organized. He supported himself and his wife by teaching and doing sketches and portraits of well-to-do French couples; among his patrons was Napoleon's brother, Lucien.
Despite his talent, Ingres completed relatively few paintings in his lifetime. He worked so methodically, in his demanding search for perfection, that his complex historical paintings often took years to finish. Even following this slow pace, he frequently suffered false starts and distressing indecision about many of his works.
He continued to paint until a week before his death. The last portrait he painted was one of himself at the age of eighty-five. He had fulfilled his program, his life was coming to an end, and in two years he was dead. When he died in 1867, he left a legacy marking him as one of the greatest classical artists since Raphael.
Written and submitted August 2004 by Jean Ershler Schatz, artist and researcher from Laguna Woods, California.
Sources:
Excerpt from Lord Kenneth Clark's The Romantic Rebellion
Architectural Digest
Time Magazine, February 17, 1967 and April 7, 1961
Masterpieces of Art, Catalogue of the New York World's Fair 1940; Metropolitan Museum of Art Miniatures: Ingres.
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