Jean-auguste-dominique ingres biography of william hill

Ingres' output included female nudes , a range of mythological painting , several religious paintings and portraits, all executed with the sort of high 'finish' required by the French Academy - the guardian of conservative aesthetics. Not surprisingly therefore, he is seen as one of the top exponents of " academic art " and one of the last Old Masters of his era.

Ironically, while he yearned to be admired for his history painting - the most exalted genre in the official Hierarchy of the Genres - he is nowadays best appreciated for his portrait art and figure painting , both of which were outstanding. For more about the impact of Ingres' art on twentieth century painting, please see: Classical Revival in modern art Ingres' rise from provincial art student to the top ranks of French painters was slow and fitful, although he remained doggedly confident of his chosen path.

Born in Montauban, north of Toulouse in southern France, his father was an artist of sorts: a painter of miniatures, sculptor, stonemason and musician. From an early age, the young Ingres was encouraged to draw and learn music. He attended a local school but his formal education came to a close when the school was shut during the French Revolution.

In he enrolled in the Royal Academy in Toulouse, to study figure drawing and landscape. In , he was awarded first prize for drawing by the Academy, and then went to Paris to study with Jacques-Louis David, then the leading exponent of neoclassical painting. He remained in David's studio for four years. He made his debut at the Salon with Portrait of a Woman in This piece is now lost.

Shortly after he won a prestigious commission, along with five other artists to paint a portrait of Napoleon Bonaparte. 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.

In this way he supported himself and his wife, Madeleine Chapelle, whom he had married in 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.

But this is not the case. In each portrait Ingres's drawing breathes, expanding and contracting to meet the demands of the personality confronting him. At one moment his line flows quietly, merely suggesting a form; in the next it becomes an agitated arabesque, dramatically enriching an element of body or clothing and serving as a metaphor for human feeling.

Moreover, each portrait establishes a unique relationship between sitter and viewer: in some, the linear elements cascade down toward the viewer, inviting access to the sitter's world; in others, severe verticals or horizontals keep the beholder at a distance. He sent it to the Salon of and, for the first time in almost 2 decades, returned to Paris for the annual exhibition.

By the end of he had opened a Paris studio and had begun to take students. To some historians the huge success of the work has seemed peculiar, largely because it does not appear to be one of the master's most original creations or to mark any decisive stylistic break with works that had been negatively received at earlier Salons. As he says, "Perhaps it was because in this same Salon of Delacroix exhibited his Massacre of Chios and, needing an upholder of tradition to oppose this revolutionary innovator, the public was happy to find an artist who brought to the conservative point of view such great technical skill and such an irreproachably worthy style.

There is much evidence to substantiate Friedlaender's claim. During their own lifetimes Ingres and Delacroix were viewed and to some extent viewed themselves as the leaders of classicism and romanticism and as fierce rivals. That there are many relationships between their respective oeuvres—each combining classicism and romanticism— has become apparent only recently.

New studies have thus replaced the simplistic view that the works of the two masters are in clearly opposite camps. In the director of the museums of France commissioned him to paint the Apotheosis of Homer as a ceiling mural in the Charles X Museum at the Louvre; it was completed the following 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.

He resigned his professorship in Throughout these years Ingres's personal life included very few dramatic events. In Ingres went back to Paris and continued to teach—his fame now brought him a legion of followers—and to produce numerous portraits, including the sensational Madame d'Haussonville. His wife died in ; he married Delphine Ramel in Perhaps the most singular event in Ingres's long and tireless career came in at the Exposition Universelle in Paris.

The master was honored with a separate exhibition of his work, a forerunner of the one-man retrospective exhibitions so common today. Yet, even this triumph was tinged with irony because Ingres's archrival, Delacroix, was similarly honored. It was destroyed in May when the Paris Commune set fire to the building. In he was awarded the title of Senator, and made a member of the Imperial Council on Public Instruction.

Three of his works were shown in the London International Exhibition, [ 83 ] and his reputation as a major French painter was confirmed once more. He continued to rework and refine his classic themes. In he produced new versions of The Virgin of the Host , and in he completed Christ and the Doctors , a work commissioned many years before by Queen Marie Amalie for the chapel of Bizy.

At the request of the Uffizi Gallery of Florence, he made his own-self portrait in The only colour in the painting is the red of his rosette of the Legion of Honour. Near the end of his life, he made one of his best-known masterpieces, The Turkish Bath. It reprised a figure and theme he had been painting since , with his Petite Baigneuse.

Originally completed in a square format in and sold to Prince Napoleon in , it was returned to the artist soon afterward—according to a legend, Princess Clothilde was shocked by the abundant nudity. The painting continued to cause a scandal long after Ingres was dead. It was initially offered to the Louvre in , but was rejected, [ 91 ] before being given to the Louvre in Ingres died of pneumonia on 14 January , at the age of eighty-six, in his apartment on the Quai Voltaire in Paris.

Ingres's style was formed early in life and changed comparatively little. From the first, his paintings are characterized by a firmness of outline reflecting his often-quoted conviction that "drawing is the probity of art". See what is left after that. Drawing is seven eighths of what makes up painting. 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.

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. In 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 , [ 98 ] 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.

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. The ancients did not create, they did not make; they recognized. 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.

Although capable of painting quickly, he often laboured for years over a painting. Ingres's pupil 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 It was begun in the s 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 was a loss.

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 , an emerging consensus viewed his portrait paintings as his masterpieces. Baudelaire called him "the sole man in France who truly makes portraits.

The portraits of M. Bertin, M. A good portrait seems to me always as a biography dramatized. 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. The portrait quickly became a symbol of the rising economic and political power of Bertin's social class. 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.

The eye of the viewer would perceive the fabrics as realistic and would assume the face was equally true. 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".

His portrait drawings, of which about are extant, [ ] 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:. Before his departure in the fall of 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.

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 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. 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. 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 ". 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.

Jean-auguste-dominique ingres biography of william hill

Ingres drew a number of 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. 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. A dull and opaque effect is found in all their canvases. They seem to have only been lit by twilight.

Ingres have very uselessly avoided any semblance of colour; they believe or pretend to believe that they are not needed in painting. 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. Ingres and Delacroix became, in the midth century, the most prominent representatives of the two competing schools of art in France, neoclassicism and romanticism.

Neo-classicism was based in large part on the philosophy of Johann Joachim Winckelmann — , who wrote that art should embody "noble simplicity and calm grandeur". A competing school, romanticism, emerged first in Germany, and moved quickly to France. It rejected the idea of the imitation of classical styles, which it described as "gothic" and "primitive".

Ingres's painting was calm, static and carefully constructed, while the work of Delacroix was turbulent, full of motion, colour, and emotion. The dispute between the two painters and schools reappeared at the Salon, where Ingres presented L'Apotheose d'Homer , an example of classical balance and harmony, while Delacroix showed The Death of Sardanapalus , another glittering and tumultuous scene of violence.

The duel between the two painters, each considered the best of his school, continued over the years. Paris artists and intellectuals were passionately divided by the conflict, although modern art historians tend to regard Ingres and other Neoclassicists as embodying the Romantic spirit of their time. At the Universal Exposition, both Delacroix and Ingres were well represented.

The supporters of Delacroix and the romantics heaped abuse on the work of Ingres. Ingres calls vainly to his assistance a certain wisdom, decency, convenience, correction and a reasonable dose of the spiritual elevation that a graduate of a college demands. He scatters persons around the center of the action Baudelaire also, previously sympathetic toward Ingres, shifted toward Delacroix.

Ingres can be considered a man gifted with high qualities, an eloquent evoker of beauty, but deprived of the energetic temperament which creates the fatality of genius. Delacroix himself was merciless toward Ingres. Indeed, despite its informalities, Ingres's Portrait of Monsieur Bertin is anything but careless; meticulously drawn - one can practically count the strands of gray hair falling in tousled locks - and highly composed, the artist famously struggled to perfect the pose and demeanor of his sitter, producing many preparatory sketches in various configurations.

The seemingly casual pose, later emulated by Pablo Picasso in his portrait of Gertrude Stein , broke from the traditional repertoire of portrait poses. There is a startling immediacy that was far ahead of its time; as one of Ingres's students, Louis Lacuria, wrote in a letter to a fellow painter, "Let me tell you that I was ruined, dumbfounded, shattered, when I saw the portrait of M.

Bertin de Vaux, when I saw that full and complete obedience to nature, that absolute self-denial by the painter, that brush so completely mastered, I couldn't believe it. The critical response to the painting at the Salon of , however, was less impressed by Ingres's verisimilitude; instead, critics rejected this naturalism and the monotone palette.

Bertin, a journalist and ardent supporter of the July Monarchy, was an archetypal member of the ascending bourgeoisie. Ingres's portrait was disparaged as overtly opportunistic and self-congratulatory, and was widely received as representative of the new, bourgeois era. The Turkish Bath both summarizes Ingres's treatment of the female nude and extends his legacy into the modern era.

One of his most complex compositions, bodies seem to spill past the limits of the round canvas, the cramped spatial depth seems to multiply the plentiful flesh. Situating the viewer within an Orientalist interior, Ingres demonstrates his continued interest in colonialist themes. The open sensuality of the figures is striking, as their limbs intertwine to display an available, exotic eroticism.

Once more, Ingres brings together elements of the Neoclassical and the Romantic. His signature sinuous line verges on the fluidity of an arabesque, although he maintains the sculptural surface and precise rendering of his training. As with his earlier female nudes, Ingres takes artistic liberties when representing human anatomy - the limbs and torsos of the figures are distorted in order to achieve a more harmonious aesthetic - and yet they are painted with the undetectable brushwork of an academician.

Never having traveled to the Near East or Africa, Ingres was inspired by the letters of the 18 th -century aristocrat Lady Mary Montague, copying her writings on the Ottoman Empire into his own notes. In one letter, Montague described the crowded bath at Adrianople: "naked women in various poses The sensuous nature of this expansive array of female flesh was too much for Ingres's patron.

The painting was returned to Ingres, who continued to modify it extensively until He finally decided to radically alter the traditional, rectangular format of the painting into a tondo, augmenting the sense of compression among the figures. Only in was the painting displayed publicly; even then, its debut at the Salon d'Automne was deemed revolutionary.

Ingres was enthusiastically received by the emerging avant-garde as titillating and audacious in his treatment of flesh, abstraction of the body, and celebration of female sexuality. In particular, the young Pablo Picasso found it compelling, creating a series of works that recall the subject, including his Les Demoiselles d'Avignon Ingres's painting also inspired the many odalisques and female nudes of the Fauve artist Henri Matisse.

The eldest child of the sculptor, painter, and musician Jean-Marie-Joseph Ingres, Jean-Auguste-Dominique was born in in Montauban, a small town in southern France. Under his father's tutelage, he showed a talent for violin and a proclivity for drawing at a young age; his earliest-known signed drawing dates to He also continued his interest in music, performing second violin with the Orchestre du Capitole de Toulouse from to Ingres's musical abilities would later give birth to the phrase "Ingres's violin," used to describe a prodigious, but secondary talent, overshadowed by one's primary occupation; the term would later serve as the title for a famous Surrealist photograph by Man Ray.

Following the typical progression for ambitious young artists, Ingres left Toulouse for Paris in August ; his father had secured him a place in the studio of the illustrious Neoclassical master, Jacques-Louis David. Here he would benefit from not only the instruction of David, but also the vibrant Parisian art world. The recent French military victories in Holland, Belgium, and Italy had brought to Paris trophies from historical art collections, providing Ingres with an unprecedented access to masterpieces of Renaissance art.

His love of Raphael, in particular, was stoked by the presence of the Madonna della Sedia c. This "School of David," adopted many precepts of their master, but also broke with his example; in particular, they began to favor more emotionally evocative and sensuous subjects, which encouraged a less rigid style of painting. This penchant for resolute independence would follow him throughout his career, giving him a reputation for solitude and, later in life, even narrow-mindedness.

Ingres's early work demonstrates his mastery of academic convention, as well as his experimental breaks with that tradition; this combination brought his early success, his Ambassadors of Agamemnon was awarded the Prix de Rome. Political uncertainties and financial shortages, delayed his departure for Rome for five years. During this time, Ingres continued to work in Paris, quickly establishing his talent for portraiture.

As the winner of the Prix de Rome, Ingres was expected to send work to Paris to demonstrate his progress; he was determined to excel in his contributions. Instead of merely sending back an academic male nude, his Oedipus and the Sphinx transformed that exercise into a history painting, the genre most celebrated by the Academy. While he felt portraiture was an unimportant use of his talent, it was profitable and necessitated by his marriage to Madeleine Chapelle.

Indeed, it was only by virtue of his reputation as a portrait painter that Ingres survived the financial fallout of the Napoleonic Wars, ending in the Empire's collapse in While he was encouraged by the state's purchase of his Roger Freeing Angelica from the Salon of , his other works were not so well received, and so he remained in Italy, moving to Florence in Only weeks after his arrival in Florence, Ingres received the most important commission of his career.

The French ministry of the interior requested a large-scale religious painting for the cathedral at Montauban, the artist's hometown, to memorialize the consecration of France by Louis XIII to the Virgin Mary in The following year, he received the Cross of the Legion of Honor from Charles X and another commission for a grand history painting on a ceiling at the Louvre, The Apotheosis of Homer Despite this official recognition, Ingres occasionally stumbled.

The Martyrdom at Saint Symphorian , completed in for the cathedral at Autun was poorly received at that year's Salon; critics disparaged its dark tonalities, disorderly composition, and the anatomical distortion of his figures. True to his temperamental reputation, Ingres swore that he would neither exhibit at the Salon nor accept government commissions ever again.

After edging out fellow painter Horace Vernet by one vote, he returned to Rome in December Despite his dramatic exit from Paris, the still-ambitious Ingres was not entirely true to his word. Commissioned by Prince Ferdinand-Philippe, an esteemed collector and son of King Louis-Philippe, Antiochus and Stratonice was very well received in a private exhibition staged in the patron's residence.

Although I have always been a modest and humble little boy before the Ancients, [