Background

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres was born on August 29, 1780, in Montauban, France. He was a son of Jean-Marie-Joseph Ingres, a talented sculptor, painter and musician, and Anne Moulet, a wigmaker's daughter.

Jean-Auguste-Dominique had six brothers and sisters, only five of whom survived infancy.

Education

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres revealed the talent for violin and drawing in childhood. Ingres's father was the first who encouraged the boy to study painting and gave him the first drawing and music lessons. Then, Ingres attended the École des Frères de l'Éducation Chrétienne from 1786 to 1791.

In 1791, the future painter enrolled at the Toulouse Royal Academy of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture where he studied history, landscape painting, and sculpture. At Toulouse, where his father had removed from Montauban in 1792, Ingres received lessons from the landscape painter Jean Briant and from the neoclassical painter Joseph Roques, whom he quitted at the end of a few months to become a pupil of the sculptor Jean-Pierre Vigan, professor at the academy of fine arts in the same town.

Ingres was a brilliant student and often received prizes. So, in March 1797, he was awarded the first prize in drawing which gave him possibility to study in the Parisian studio of Jacques-Louis David, the most famous neoclassicist painter, where Jean-Auguste traveled in August of the same year. Two years later, in October, Ingres was admitted to the École des Beaux-Arts (the School of Fine Arts).

Like nearly every serious artist at the School, Jean-Auguste Ingres wished to study in Rome, the locus of classical antiquity to which the School philosophically aspired. The opportunity arrived in 1801, when he won the coveted Prix de Rome with his painting The Ambassadors of Agamemnon in the tent of Achilles. The prize was a scholarship from the French government allowing art students to study at the French Academy in Rome. Because of political conditions, however, the stipend for the Prix de Rome didn't become available until 1806, and it was not until the end of that year that Ingres finally reached the Eternal City. He spent the next four years at the French Academy in Rome.

Career

Having brilliant music capacities, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres started his career as the second violinist at the Orchestre du Capitole de Toulouse where he had played from 1794 for two years. The first Salon where Ingres presented his work, Portrait of a Woman, to the public, was organized in 1802.

As to the official painting career, it began in 1804 from his first commission as a portraitist according to which he created the Portrait of Napoléon Bonaparte, The First Council. Two years later, Ingres presented five of his portraits at the Paris Salon, including the portraits of Sabine Rivière and of her daughter Caroline, and Napoleon I on His Imperial Throne. Before his trip to Rome, Jean-Auguste had worked for some time at Marie-Anne-Julie Forestier, a painter and musician.

Between 1806 and 1820 Ingres produced some of his best-known and most original paintings, including the Bather of Valpinçon (1808), Jupiter and Thetis (1811), and the Grande Odalisque (1814). The pictures received negative reviews during the annual Salon exhibitions in Paris. In the critics' opinion, the works were "Gothic" and "primitive." Although the paintings show a strong resemblance to Davidian classicism, particularly in their idealized figures, tight sculptural drawing, localized color, painstaking illusionism, and suppression of painterly surface incident, they also seem anticlassical, even romantic.

After working in Rome, Ingres moved to Florence in 1824, a decision that was influenced by Lorenzo Bartolini, a sculptor friend he had met in 1799 in Jacques-Louis David's studio. Ingres remained in Florence for 4 years. During this period, as well as during the years in Rome, years in which his most ambitious paintings continued to be unsympathetically received in the Parisian Salons, the artist produced numerous portrait paintings and drawings.

Ingres's portraits are extraordinary examples of the way a graphic language can be made to reveal the presence and uniqueness of the human personality. Superficially they appear cool and aloof, almost repetitious in their taut verisimilitude. In each portrait Ingres's drawing breathes, expanding and contracting to meet the demands of the personality confronting him.

While in Florence, the artist completed the Vow of Louis XIII (1824) for the Cathedral of his native town of Montauban. This painting marked a turning point in Ingres's career. He sent it to the Salon of 1824 and, for the first time in almost 2 decades, returned to Paris for the annual exhibition. By the end of 1824 Jean-Auguste opened studio in Paris and begun to take students.

The public success initiated by the Vow of Louis XIII continued for Ingres through the next four decades. In 1826 the director of the museums of France commissioned Ingres to paint the Apotheosis of Homer as a ceiling mural in the Charles X Museum at the Louvre. The work was completed the next year. This ambitious composition, which Ingres executed as an easel picture, shows an ideal gathering of the most famous exemplars of classical thought and art, of the history to which Ingres personally aligned himself.

The next step of Ingres's career was the teaching activity which started from the professor's post at the Parisian École des Beaux-Arts (School of Fine Arts) in 1829. Three years later, he became its vice president and then, in 1833, its president till his return to Rome where he succeeded Horace Vernet as director of the French Academy.

While on this post, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres contributed a lot to the institution by enlarging its library and the collection of classical statues. Besides, he gave a lot of attention to music which was taught at the Academy. So, the painter welcomed there such famous composers as Franz Liszt and Fanny Mendelssohn.

Ingres went back to Paris in 1841 and continued to teach at École des Beaux-Arts. His fame now brought him a legion of followers, and he produced numerous portraits, including the sensational Madame d'Haussonville. The murals for the great hall in the Château de Dampierre commissioned in 1843 by the Duc de Luynes were one of his documented projects of this period. The work was stopped in four years because of the patron's discontent and was definitively thrown up after the death of Ingres's wife.

At the end of the life, Jean-Auguste created one of his most notable masterpieces, The Turkish Bath (1863). The work was eventually sold to a Turkish diplomat, Khalid Bey and passed to the Louvre in 1911.

Achievements

• Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres was a prolific artist and gifted music amateur who created a great number of masterpieces.
  
  The artist exercised a big influence on the Modern art, in particular on such famous painters as Edouard Manet (Olympia), Henri Matisse, Edgar Degas, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Gustave Moreau. Pablo Picasso used Ingres's portraits as the prototype for his interwar classical paintings. According to an abstract expressonist painter Barnett Newman, Ingres was a precursor of Abstract Expressionism due to the artist's aesthetic and compositional effects.
  
  Ingres was a gifted teacher admired by his pupils, including such notable artists as Théodore Chassériau, Jean-Hippolyte Flandrin, Henri Lehmann, and Eugène Emmanuel Amaury-Duval.
  
  Ingres's well-known passion for playing the violin gave rise to a common expression in the French language, "violon d'Ingres," meaning a second skill beyond the one by which a person is mainly known. The term was used by Man Ray for the title of his Surrealist photograph depicting life model Alice Prin in 1924.

Works

More photos

• painting

  • Napoleon I on his Imperial Throne

  • The Valpinçon Bather

  • Jupiter and Thetis

  • La Grande Odalisque

  • The Vow of Louis XIII

  • Antiochus and Stratonice

  • Portrait of the Princesse de Broglie

  • Portrait of Madame Moitessier Sitting

  • The Source

  • The Turkish Bath

  • Amédée-David, The Marquis de Pastoret

  • Joan of Arc at the Coronation of Charles

  • Portrait of Joseph-Antoine Moltedo

  • The Death of Leonardo da Vinci

  • Portrait of French Journalist Louis-François Bertin

  • Portrait of Louise de Broglie, Contesse d'Haussonville

  • Portrait of Madame Riviere

  • Portrait of Mademoiselle Caroline Rivière

  • Odalisque with a Slave

  • Oedipus and the Sphinx

  • Portrait of François-Marius Granet

  • Ruggiero Rescuing Angelica

  • The Apotheosis of Homer

  • The Dream of Ossian

Views

Quotations: "Drawing is the honesty of art."

"Drawing includes three and a half quarters of the content of painting... Drawing contains everything, except the hue."

"To draw does not simply mean to reproduce contours; the drawing does not simply consist in the idea: the drawing is even the expression, the interior form, the plan, the model. Look what remains after that! The drawing is three fourths and a half of what constitutes painting. If I had to put a sign over my door to the atelier, I would write: School of drawing, and I'm certain that I would create painters."

"The chief consideration for a good painter is to think out the whole of his picture, to have it in his head as a whole... so that he may then execute it with warmth and as if the entire thing were done at the same time."

"Make copies, young man, many copies. You can only become a good artist by copying the masters."

"A painter can turn pennies into gold, for all subjects are capable of being transformed into poems."

"It takes 25 years to learn to draw, one hour to learn to paint."

"The exhibition has now become no more than a bazaar where mediocrity spreads itself out with impudence. The exhibitions are useless and dangerous... they ought to be abolished."

"The way good inventions are made is to familiarize yourself with those of others. The men who cultivate letters and the arts are all sons of Homer."

"As long as you do not hold a balance between your seeing of things and your execution, you will do nothing that is really good."

"Is there anyone among the great men who has not imitated? Nothing is made with nothing."

"Fine and delicate taste is the fruit of education and experience."

"What do these so-called artists mean when they preach the discovery of the 'new'? Is there anything new? Everything has been done, everything has been discovered."

"Better gray than garishness."

"Do not concern yourself with other people. Concern yourself with your own work alone."

Membership

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres was a member of the French Imperial Council on Public Instruction.

• Imperial Council on Public Instruction , France

  1862

Personality

In Etienne-Jean Delecluze's opinion who met the artist in the studio of David, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres tried to work in isolation in order to find his own personal style. This aspect of personality remained throughout the entire Ingres's career.

Quotes from others about the person

• "He was distinguished not just by the candor of his character and his disposition to work alone ... he was one of the most studious ... he took little part in the all the turbulent follies around him, and he studied with more perseverance than most of his co-disciples ... All of the qualities which characterize today the talent of this artist, the finesse of contour, the true and profound sentiment of the form, and a modeling with extraordinary correctness and firmness, could already be seen in his early studies. While several of his comrades and David himself signaled a tendency toward exaggeration in his studies, everyone was struck by his grand compositions and recognized his talent." – Étienne-Jean Delécluze, a painter and art critic
  
  "He had the tenderness of an infant and the indignation of an apostle." – Charles Gounod, a composer
  
  "That guy was an abstract painter. [...] Kline, de Kooning – none of us would have existed without him." – Barnett Newman, a painter
  
  "...One realizes in how many ways a variety of artists claim him as their master, from the most plainly conventional of the nineteenth century such as Cabanel or Bouguereau, to the most revolutionary of our century from Matisse to Picasso. A classicist? Above all, he was moved by the impulse to penetrate the secret of natural beauty and to reinterpret it through its own means; an attitude fundamentally different to that of David ... there results a truly personal and unique art admired as much by the Cubists for its plastic autonomy, as by the Surrealists for its visionary qualities." – Pierre Barousse, the curator of the Musée Ingres

Interests

• Artists

  Raphael

• Music & Bands

  Carl Maria von Weber, Hector Berlioz, Ludwig van Beethoven, Franz Joseph Haydn, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Christoph Willibald Gluck

Connections

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres married a young woman Madeleine Chapelle in 1813. Their marriage was a happy one, and Madame Ingres's faith in her husband was unwavering despite the difficulties of their common existence. Unfortunately, Madeleine died on 27 July in 1849.

At the age of seventy-one, Ingres married a second time to forty-three-year-old Delphine Ramel.

Father:

Jean-Marie-Joseph Ingres

(1755 – 14 March 1814)

Mother:

Anne Ingres

(née Moulet; 1758 – 1817)

Spouse:

Delphine Ingres

(née Ramel; 26 December 1808 – 11 May 1887)

late spouse:

Madeleine Ingres

(née Chapelle; 1782 – 27 July 1849)

Friend:

Lorenzo Bartolini

(7 January 1777 – 20 January 1850)

Bartolini was an Italian sculptor who represented neoclassicism. His works were inspired primarily by the Florentine Renaissance.

teacher:

Jean Briant

(3 February 1760 – 19 August 1799)

Briant was a landscape artist.

teacher:

Guillaume-Joseph Roques

(1757–1847)

Roques was a a French painter who represented Neoclassicism and Romanticism. A copy of Jacques-Louis David's The Death of Marat (1793) is among his most important works.

teacher:

Jean-Pierre Vigan

(1754 – 1829)

teacher:

Jacques-Louis David

(30 August 1748 – 29 December 1825)

David was a highly influential French painter in the Neoclassical style and the prominent painter of the era. His style set the artistic standards for many of his contemporaries and determined the direction of numerous 19th-century painters.

Friend:

Etienne-Jean Delécluze

(26 February 1781 – 12 July 1863)

Friend:

Anne-Louis Girodet

(29 January 1767 – 9 December 1824)

Girodet was a French painter and illustrator, who represented Romanticism movement. He was mostly known for his paintings, featuring elements of eroticism. Also, Anne-Louis loved to produce effects with the help of strong lights, which are nevertheless mostly in unison with the spirit of his pieces.

Friend:

Antoine-Jean Gros

(16 March 1771 – 26 June 1835)

Gros was a French painter, who represented Neoclassicism movement. Also, he created historical pictures, depicting significant events in the military career of Napoleon.

Friend:

Franz Liszt

(22 October 1811 – 31 July 1886)

Liszt was a Hungarian composer, virtuoso pianist, conductor, music teacher, arranger, organist, philanthropist, author and nationalist.

Friend:

Niccolo Paganini

(27 October 1782 – 27 May 1840)

Niccolo Paganini was an Italian violinist and composer. He was the most renowned violin virtuoso of his time. Paganini laid the foundation of modern violin technique.

pupil:

Théodore Chassériau

(20 September 1819 – 8 October 1856)

Chassériau was a French painter. Early in his career, he created his historical and religious paintings, portraits, murals and Orientalist images in Neoclassical style. Later, he shifted to Romanticism.

Chassériau also worked as a draftsman and produced a series of prints to illustrate Shakespeare's Othello.

pupil:

Jean-Hippolyte Flandrin

(23 March 1809 – 21 March 1864)

Flandrin was a French painter of 19th century.

pupil:

Henri Lehmann

(14 April 1814 – 31 March 1882)

Lehmann was a German-born French painter. He specialized in historical subjects and portraits.

References

• Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres This book catalogues the Jean-Auguste Dominique Ingres/Ellsworth Kelly exhibition at The French Academy in Rome – Villa Medici, a show that embodies the new approach toward Franco-American relations by reflecting the historic and artistic cultural ties between the two countries.
  2010
• Portraits by Ingres: Image of an Epoch Published to accompany an international exhibition, this is a study of the portraits by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres.
  1999
• Ingres: Painting Reimagined In this handsomely illustrated and elegantly written book, Susan L. Siegfried argues that the strangeness associated with Ingres’s paintings needs to be located in the complex and richly invested nature of the work itself, as well as in the artist’s very powerful – if often perverse – sense of artistic project.
  2009
• Ingres and the Studio: Women, Painting, History The book makes focuses on the importance of Ingres's training of students and the crucial role played by portraits – and their subjects – for Ingres's studio and its developing aesthetic project.
  2012
• Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres: Drawings & Details A book by Maria Peitcheva.
  2017