Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres
1780-1867
Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres was a French Neoclassical painter. Although he thought of himself as a painter of history in the tradition of Nicolas Poussin and Jacques-Louis David, by the end of his life it was his portraits, both painted and drawn, that were recognized as his greatest legacy.
A man profoundly respectful of the past, he assumed the role of a guardian of academic orthodoxy against the ascendant Romantic style represented by his nemesis Eugène Delacroix. Modern opinion has tended to regard Ingres, and the other Neoclassicists of his era, as embodying the Romantic spirit of his time. But Ingres's influence on later generations of artists has been considerable. His most significant heir was Degas, whose teacher Louis Lamothe was a minor disciple of Ingres. In the twentieth century, Picasso and Matisse were among those who acknowledged a debt to the great classicist.
Barnett Newman credited Ingres as a progenitor of abstract expressionism, explaining: "That guy was an abstract painter ....He looked at the canvas more often than at the model. Kline, de Kooning-none of us would have existed without him."
Ingres was born in Montauban, Tarn-et-Garonne, France, the first of seven children of Jean-Marie-Joseph Ingres and his wife Anne Moulet. His father was a successful jack-of-all-trades in the arts. From his father the young Ingres received early encouragement and instruction in drawing and music. Ingres's style was formed early in life and changed comparatively little. His earliest drawings already show a suavity of outline and an extraordinary control of the parallel hatchings which model the forms. He believed color 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 modeling. See what is left after that. Drawing is seven eighths of what makes up painting."
He abhorred the visible brushstroke and made no recourse to the shifting effects of colour and light on which the Romantic school depended; he preferred local colors only faintly modeled in light by half tones. Among Ingres's historical and mythological paintings, the most satisfactory are usually those depicting one or two figures.
By the time of Ingres's retrospective at the Exposition Universelle in 1855, an emerging consensus viewed his portrait paintings as his masterpieces. The most famous of all of Ingres's portraits, depicting the journalist Louis-François Bertin, quickly became a symbol of the rising economic and political power of the bourgeoisie. His portrait drawings, of which about 450 are extant, are today among his most admired works.
Ingres was regarded as an effective teacher and was beloved by his students. No other artist who studied under Ingres succeeded in establishing a strong identity.
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