INGRES, JEAN-AUGUSTE-DOMINIQUE. — French painter, born in Montauban on 29 Aug. 1780, died in Paris on 14 Jan. 1867. A pupil first of his father, then, from 1799, in Paris of David, in 1806 he went to Rome as a pensioner of the French Academy, when he was
2011 INGRES JEAN-AUGUSTE-DOMINIQUE – INITIATION 2012
already well known as an exquisite portraitist, and in Italy he remained almost uninterruptedly, between Rome and Florence, for nearly twenty years, painting there his best and most famous works.
DAVIDE (v.) at a time when the latter, during the Napoleonic period as quasi-official representative of French Neoclassical painting, railed from Paris against his former pupil who lived in solitude far from his homeland, drawn to the painting of the Italian Quattrocentists, the above-mentioned artist may be considered the exponent of the purist taste (v. PURISMO) in France. His position can indeed be seen as intermediate between the Neoclassicism of his master DELACROIX, EUGÈNE (v.), who was eighteen years his junior. It is customary to contrast the latter with Ingres, the exponent of Classicist taste, especially after the Salon of 1824, where Ingres exhibited his *Portrait of Louis XIII*, now in Montauban, and the two artists confronted each other for the first time by prominently displaying their works, and after the following year, following David’s death, Ingres was elected a member of the Institut. At the same time, with perfect logic, Ingres gradually shifted his interest from the Quattrocentists to the Cinquecentists, above all Raphael. So much so that in 1826, upon receiving the commission for a ceiling in the Musée Charles X at the Louvre, he conceived for *The Apotheosis of Homer* a composition inspired by the School of Athens, while later, for *The Martyrdom of St. Symphorian*, commissioned for Autun Cathedral, he composed a veritable cento of Raphael-esque motifs. He remained faithful to these preferences even during his new stay in Rome (1834–41) as director of the Accademia di Villa Medici and throughout the rest of his long life, both in his narrative paintings and, indeed, especially in his portraits. It is precisely in his portraits that the precision and acuity of drawing, which is supremely clear, acquires essential value, summarizing masses with extreme clarity and sharply defining fields that are exalted into chromatic values of composition. A painting that is clear, limpid, supremely distinct, reflecting the tendency of his inner Romantic spirit toward intellectual abstraction, whence an almost hallucinatory, ecstatic vision of forms. Among his works of sacred subject matter are to be noted: *Joan of Arc* (1854) at the Louvre, *The Virgin with the Host* (also of 1854) likewise at the Louvre, and *Christ Among the Doctors* in Montauban, where there is a museum with numerous of his paintings and about 4,000 of his drawings.