INGRES, JEAN-AUGUSTE-DOMINIQUE. — French painter, born in Montauban on 29 August 1780, died in Paris on 14 January 1867. Initially a pupil of his father and then, from 1799, in Paris of David, in 1806 he went to Rome as a scholarship holder of the French Academy, when he was already known as an exquisite portraitist; he remained in Italy, between Rome and Florence, for almost twenty years without interruption, painting there his finest and most famous works.
David (v.) when the latter, during the Napoleonic period, as the quasi-official representative of French neoclassical painting, inveighed from Paris against his former pupil, who lived in solitude far from his homeland, attracted by the painting of the Italian quattrocentisti, I. may be considered the representative of the purist taste (v. PURISMO) in France. His position may indeed be regarded as intermediate between his master’s neoclassicism DELACROIX, EUGÈNE (v.), who was eighteen years younger than he. It is customary to contrast I. with the latter as the representative of the classicist taste, especially after the Salon of 1824, where I.’s The Face of Louis XIII, now in Montauban, was displayed, and the two painters for the first time made a sensational confrontation of their works; and after the following year, when, upon David’s death, I. was elected a member of the Institut. On the other hand, at precisely that time I., with perfect logic, gradually shifted his interest from the quattrocentisti to the cinquecentisti, and above all to Raphael. Thus, in 1826, when he received the commission for a ceiling in the Museum of Charles X at the Louvre, he conceived The Apotheosis of Homer as a composition inspired by the School of Athens, whereas later, for The Martyrdom of St. Symphorian, commissioned for the cathedral of Autun, he composed a veritable centon of Raphaelesque motifs. He remained faithful to these preferences even during his renewed stay in Rome (1834–41) as director of the Academy of the Villa Medici, and throughout the subsequent course of his long life, both in his compositional paintings and, indeed, above all, in his portraits. It is precisely in the portraits that the precision and acuity of the drawing often acquire essential value: this drawing, exceedingly clear, possesses an extraordinary capacity for summarizing the masses, and, by sharply delimiting their fields, enhances the chromatic values of the composition. A clear, limpid, exceedingly pure painting, reflecting the tendency of his inwardly Romantic spirit toward intellectual abstraction, whence arises an ecstatic, almost hallucinated vision of forms. Among his works on sacred subjects, the following should be remembered: Joan of Arc (1854) in the Louvre, The Virgin with the Host (also from 1854), likewise in the Louvre, and Jesus among the Doctors in Montauban, which has a museum containing numerous paintings by him and approximately 4,000 of his drawings.