Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres: The Tyranny of the Perfect Line
A critic counted. *La Grande Odalisque*, shown in Paris in 1819, presented a reclining nude whose spine, by one hostile reckoning, ran three vertebrae too long. Ingres had not miscalculated. He described anatomy as "a dreadful science that I cannot think of without disgust," and had stretched the back because the contour demanded it. He spent half a century being told this was a defect. The twentieth century decided it was the whole point.
Montauban, and the Violin
He was born on August 29, 1780, in Montauban, to Jean-Marie-Joseph Ingres, a jobbing painter, sculptor and decorator who taught his son drawing and music, and Anne Moulet. From 1791 the boy studied at the royal academy in Toulouse under the sculptor Jean-Pierre Vigan, the landscapist Jean Briant and the neoclassicist Guillaume-Joseph Roques, collecting prizes for composition and life drawing. Between thirteen and sixteen he played second violin in the Orchestre du Capitole. The habit lasted: he performed Beethoven quartets with Paganini while running the French Academy in Rome, and Liszt in 1839 called his playing charming. French acquired an idiom from it — *violon d'Ingres*, the serious hobby that is not one's profession.
David's Studio, and a Prize Not Paid
In August 1797 he went to Paris and spent four years in the studio of Jacques-Louis David, the Revolution's official painter. He entered the École des Beaux-Arts in 1799 and won the Prix de Rome in 1801 with *The Ambassadors of Agamemnon*. The state, being broke, could not send him; he waited five years.
Meanwhile he painted the Rivière family portraits of 1805–06 and, for the Salon of 1806, *Napoleon I on His Imperial Throne*, which buries the Emperor under regalia. The reception was brutal. The critic Chaussard asked how, "with so much talent, a line so flawless, an attention to detail so thorough," Ingres had contrived to paint a bad picture. Others called the manner gothic and archaic. He left for Rome in September 1806, swore never to exhibit at the Salon again, and broke off his engagement to Marie-Anne-Julie Forestier, who observed with some dignity: "When one has had the honor of being engaged to M. Ingres, one does not marry."
Exile, and the Little Portraits
Rome produced the *Valpinçon Bather* (1808), its turban lifted from Raphael, and *Jupiter and Thetis* (1811), duly attacked for its flattened, airless space. In 1813 he married Madeleine Chapelle, whom friends had recommended and he had never met; the marriage was happy and, after a stillbirth in 1815, childless. In 1814 the Murats of Naples commissioned *La Grande Odalisque*, then fell with Napoleon; Joachim Murat was shot in 1815 and Ingres was never paid.
For six years he had no patronage at all and supported himself drawing pencil portraits of English tourists — work he despised, and which now ranks among his most admired. Asked at his door whether this was where the man who drew the little portraits lived, he replied: "No, the man who lives here is a painter!" Roughly 450 of those drawings survive.
The Vow of Louis XIII
Everything turned in 1824. *The Vow of Louis XIII*, four years' labour for Montauban cathedral and openly Raphaelesque, triumphed at the Salon. Adolphe Thiers hailed "the breakthrough of a new style." Charles X gave him the Légion d'honneur in January 1825; the Académie des Beaux-Arts elected him that June. Lithographs of the *Odalisque* published in 1826 earned him 24,000 francs, twenty times what the painting itself had been worth to him.
Line Against Colour
The 1827 Salon staged the confrontation that defined French painting for a generation: Ingres's *Apotheosis of Homer*, shown unfinished in grisaille, against Delacroix's *Death of Sardanapalus*. Ingres called his rival "the apostle of ugliness."
His doctrine was absolute. "Drawing is the probity of art"; "drawing is seven eighths of what makes up painting." Colour was merely "the handmaiden," and bright colour was "anti-historic" — better, he taught, to fall into grey. As a professor he marched students through the Louvre and instructed them to look straight ahead and avoid the Rubenses.
The 1834 *Martyrdom of Saint Symphorian*, ten years in the making and intended as the summation of his art, was savaged by classicists and romantics alike. He renounced public commissions and the Salon and left to direct the French Academy in Rome, where he stayed six years, reorganised the library, bought casts, befriended Liszt, and told his doorman that if Stendhal — who had disparaged Beethoven — ever called again, he was not at home.
The Turkish Bath
He returned to Paris in 1841. His wife's death in 1849 stopped him working on the vast Dampierre murals, which had already consumed six years and more than five hundred preparatory drawings; they were never finished. In 1852, at seventy-one, he married the forty-three-year-old Delphine Ramel and revived. The 1855 Universal Exposition retrospective settled his stature, and Napoleon III made him a Grand Officer of the Légion d'honneur, then a senator in 1862.
*The Source* was completed in 1856 from sketches of the 1820s; *Venus Anadyomene*, begun about 1807, was finished in 1848. In 1862–63 he reworked an old composition into a tondo and produced *The Turkish Bath*, a swarm of nudes painted in his eighties. Prince Napoleon returned it as too much; the Louvre refused it in 1907 and accepted it in 1911.
Why Jean-Auguste-Dominique Is Called a Genius
The specific faculty is draughtsmanship of an almost pathological refinement — an eye for contour so dominant that it overrode everything painting is otherwise supposed to respect. Ingres could hold a single sinuous line across a body for its whole length and subordinate bone, muscle and plausible space to it. The elongated spine of the *Odalisque* is not an error but a decision: arabesque beating anatomy. He flattened depth until, as critics complained, his figures sat on the canvas like cards in a deck. He drew a portrait in four hours across two sittings and rarely retouched it.
The word has been used and refused by serious people. Barnett Newman said flatly, "That guy was an abstract painter... Kline, de Kooning — none of us would have existed without him." Baudelaire delivered the sharpest verdict: Ingres was "a man gifted with high qualities... but deprived of the energetic temperament which creates the fatality of genius." Delacroix called his 1855 retrospective "the complete expression of an incomplete intelligence"; the Goncourts sneered at a "miserly talent."
The counter-case is his contemporaries', not mine. His style formed early and barely moved — Jean Clay noted he "proceeded always from certitude to certitude." His taste was reactionary, his teaching prohibitive, his pupils forgettable, and his chosen masterpieces the vast history paintings nobody now looks at, while posterity keeps the portraits he thought lesser work. He was a supreme executant with a narrow mind, which may be exactly what the word should mean here.
Legacy
He died of pneumonia on January 14, 1867, aged eighty-six, at his apartment on the Quai Voltaire, and lies in Père Lachaise. He left his studio, more than four thousand drawings and his violin to Montauban, where they form the Musée Ingres. In 1905 a retrospective at the Salon d'automne showed *The Turkish Bath* publicly for the first time; Picasso and Matisse both saw it. Its tangled bodies surface in *Les Demoiselles d'Avignon* two years later, the Bertin pose in Picasso's *Gertrude Stein*, the circling dancers in Matisse's *La Danse*. The most conservative painter in France turned out to have drawn the twentieth century's first sketches.
Achievements
- Knight of the Legion of Honour — 1825
- Officer of the Legion of Honour — 1833
- Grand Officer of the Legion of Honour — 1855
- Commander of the Legion of Honour — 1845
- Notable work: Mademoiselle Caroline Rivière
- Notable work: Grande Odalisque
- Notable work: The Turkish Bath
- Affiliated with Orchestre national du Capitole de Toulouse
- Educated at Beaux-Arts de Paris and French Academy in Rome
- Worked as painter, politician and violinist
