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Jean-Auguste Dominique Ingres
(Aug. 29,1780 Mounauban, Fr.- Jan. 14,1867 Paris) French Oil Painting Artist Biography.
Jean-Auguste Domenique Ingres early academic training was in the Toulouse Academy after which he went to Paris in 1796 and was a fellow student of Gros in Jaques-Louis David's art studio. He began his career as a painter of classical history and in 1801, won the Prix de Rome, but owing to the state of France's economy he was not awarded the usual stay in Rome until 1807. In the interval he produced his first oil portraits. These fall into two categories, portraits of himself and his friends, conceived in a Romantic spirit and portraits of rich clients which are characterized by purity of line and enamel-like coloring. These early portraits are notable for their calligraphic line and expressive contour, which had a sensuous beauty of its own beyond its function to contain and delineate form. It was a feature that formed the essential basis of Ingres's oil paintings throughout his life.
During his first years in Rome he continued to execute portraits and began to paint bathers, a theme which was to become one of his favorites, The Valpinçon Bather (1808, Louvre, Paris). He remained in Rome when his four-year scholarship ended, earning his living principally by doing pencil portraits of French expatriates. He also received more substantial commissions, including two decorative oil paintings for Napoleon's palace in Rome. Around 1812 Ingres initiated what was to become an equally significant aspect of his history oil painting, the depiction of modern subjects. In pursuing this direction Ingres aligned himself with a small group of Davidian students who have been called the “Troubadour” painters. Like them, Ingres blurred the distinction between history and genre painting by selecting subjects of an anecdotal rather than heroic nature.
In 1820 he moved from Rome to Florence, where he remained for 4 years. The stylistic approach used by Ingres and the troubadour painters combined the reductive impulses of neoclassicism with a taste for high finish and detail. Ingres, however, surpassed his colleagues both in the range of his subject matter and in the style he employed. He found pictorial inspiration not only in the venerated High Renaissance old masters, such as Raphael, but also in Medieval and Early Renaissance oil paintings that were still considered strange and “gothic” by his contemporaries. When he accompanied one of his oil painting to the Salon of 1824 he was surprised to find it acclaimed and himself set up as the leader of the academic opposition to the new Romanticism.
Ingres stayed in Paris for the next ten years and received the official success and honors he had always craved. During this period he devoted much of his time to executing two large works. He accepted the Directorship of the French School in Rome, a post he kept for 7 years. He was a model administrator and teacher, greatly improving the school's facilities, but he produced few major works in this period. In 1841 he returned to France, once again acclaimed as the champion of traditional values. He was heartbroken when his wife died in 1849, he made a successful second marriage in 1852 and continued working with great energy into his 80s. At the time of his death he left a huge bequest of his work, several oil paintings and more than 4,000 drawings to his home town of Montauban and they are now in the museum bearing his name there.
Jean-Auguste Ingres is a puzzling artist and his career is full of contradictions. Yet more than most artists he was obsessed by a restricted number of themes and returned to the same subject again and again over a long period of years. He was a bourgeois with the limitations of a bourgeois mentality, but as Baudelaire remarked, his finest works `are the product of a deeply sensuous nature'. The central contradiction of his career is that although he was held up as the guardian of Neo-Classical rules and ideas, it is his personal obsessions and mannerisms that make him such a great artist. His technique as a painter was academically unimpeachable, he said paint should be as smooth "as the skin of an onion", but he was often attacked for the expressive distortions of his draughtsmanship. Critics said, for example, that the abnormally long back of La Grande Odalisque (1814, Louvre) had three extra vertebrae. He had scores of students, as a great calligraphic genius his true successors are Edgar Degas and Pablo Picasso, making a mark on the worlds artist.
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Madame Moitessier
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La Grande Odalisque
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The Valpinçon Bather
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