Art e Dossier

During the period that Ingres lived in a cell in the former convent of the Capuchins in Paris, along with the Tuscan sculptor, Lorenzo Bartolini, he painted this self-portrait that was to be a pendant to the portrait of his friend that he painted two years later. This gives idea of the deep friendship between the two artists who shared a fondness for playing the violin and for Flaxman’s Homeric illustrations. The painting, as we see it today, is the result of several changes that Ingres made over the course of the years that made it more representative, while the quality of the work is still outstanding.

Napoleon hated long sittings for portraits, so he granted Ingres just one short meeting. For this reason the First Consul’s facial expressions seem stilted and the portrait focuses more on chromatic effects and the rendering of the setting. Napoleon commissioned the portrait for the city of Liege to commemorate the decree with which he granted the city a large sum of money to rebuild the suburb of Amercoeur that the Austrians had razed to the ground in 1794. From the window we can see the cathedral of Saint Lambert that was also destroyed. The painting reveals Ingres’ extraordinary ability in rendering the texture of the fabrics, the red velvet of the coat and the dark velvets of the furnishings.

Of all the Ingres’ portraits of the Rivière family, this one of Monsieur Rivière seems to best reflect the lessons of his teacher, David. The natural pose, that qualifies the subject’s social role and intellectual virtues, links it to works such as David’s portraits of the Monsieur and Madame Lavoisier and of Monsieur Sériziat. The chromatic contrasts and the special highlighting are characteristic of Ingres and at the time were a novelty that aroused more than a little criticism among his contemporaries. Among papers we can see a small engraving of Raphael’s Madonna of the Chair. Ingres spent a long time studying Raphael’s works and selected him as his main reference point.

This is a portrait of Caroline Rivière, the young daughter of M. and Mme Rivière, who died at the age of thirteen, shortly after Ingres completed the painting. Her beauty and virginal purity are exalted by the white dress and fur boa, a white that Ingres liked especially, but that the contemporary public did not comprehend because it spread too cold and bright a light throughout the painting. This was the same reason that the portrait of the mother, Madame Rivière was also considered too white and none of the innovations, such as the close-up view and the significant impasto of different fabrics and colors were not appreciated.

Ordered for the seat of the legislature, this portrait reveals the same stilted and distracted expression of Napoleon Bonaparte as First Consul. Ingres had to be satisfied with the notions he obtained during the single sitting he had. And it is precisely for the lack of similarity with the real subject that the painting was harshly criticized to the extent that the director of the Louvre, Vivant Denon, had it removed from the Salon. Actually, Ingres had dedicated much time to the painting, “translating” the face into divine stateliness as if it were a mythological subject in which Napoleon is likened to an omnipotent Zeus. The painter had carefully studied both Medieval icons of the kings of France from which he had taken the historic attributes of the scepter and the “hand of justice” and the solutions of Flemish masters such as Holbein and Van Eyck.

ngres won the Prix de Rome in 1801, but the scholarship at the Academy of France in Rome only became available in 1806. Among the paintings that he sent to Paris during this first, four year, Roman sojourn included the Bather of Bayonne (1807) and The Valpinçon Bather with which Ingres developed a new genre of the female nude. Going beyond the question of whether or not it is the same model, Thérèse or Mariuccia, the significant fact is that all these female paintings lead back to Raphael’s Fornarina which, for Ingres, obviously represented the archetype of feminine beauty, a timeless beauty that he could transpose from the historic setting to the private bath.

This was the last painting that Ingres sent from the French Academy in the Villa Medici. The Zeus and Thetis presents the same frontal stateliness of Napoleon on his Imperial Throne. Once again, the painting was not understood and became the subject of violent and harsh criticism, over details such as the exaggerated length of Thetis’ neck that was even attributed to a thyroid disorder! However, with an incomparable sense of color and line, the painting skillfully succeeds in combining various cultural references, from some statues of Zeus in the Vatican to Flaxman’s engraving of Thetis in the Iliad. On the base we can see a bas-relief modeled on an Hellenistic cameo in the Naples museum of which Ingres had a mold.

Based on Orlando furioso by Ariosto, this painting was presented at the 1819 Salon and was purchased by king Louis XVIII for the throne room at Versailles. This painting aroused the same type of criticism received by the Zeus and Thetis, for its “reference” to the primitives, for the bizarre colors, and unusual and excessive whiteness and dissonant purple. This chromatic distortion that exalted the darkness impressed the young Delacroix who drew inspiration from it for his Barque of Dante – or Dante and Virgil in Hell - with which he earned the admiration of the sensitive Parisian public just two years later.

Back in Rome at the Villa Medici in his capacity of director of the French Academy, Ingres returned to the theme of Odalisque for the second time. The first foray into the exotic world of the harem was in 1814 when he painted the Grande Odalisque that was shown at the 1819 Salon. Now the composition is enriched with details that connote the setting, including the Orientalism that was in fashion at the time. If the use of red and ochre is similar to Delacroix’s solutions, the references to the old traditions of a Titian or Veronese belong to Ingres’ by now mature talent.

There is another full-length portrait of Madame Ines Moitessier, née de Faucauld, dressed in black against a background of a plum-colored brocade wall. This second portrait was begun immediately after the first and many changes and second thoughts about the pose and color of the dress came into the final, extremely precise, version. The perfection of the contours is exalted by the variety of colors: the flesh tones of the face match the oval that is always a reference to Raphael, like the fresh pattern of the dress that brings a touch of cheer to the setting, while the mirror behind the subject enhances her Grecian profile that was highly fashionable at the time. Fifty years later Picasso drew on this painting as the inspiration for some of his monumental figures.

Although he began thinking about it in Florence in 1829 Ingres took years to complete this painting, in fact, he worked on it until the middle of the century. A variation of the Venus that he also worked on for a long time (1808-1848), The Source portrays a goddess of the waters, who lives in fountains and rivers, a naiad with a pure, harmonious body, typical of the classic iconography of the virtues and the personifications of the Olympians. It was this sense of chastity that inspired the poet Théodore de Banville to write the Naiad Argentine that was published in 1869. Exhibited in the artist’s studio, the canvas was acclaimed by the visitors who admired the its beauty of color and purity of form.

This painting is a sort of summa of many female images that Ingres painted over a period of nearly sixty years. From the Valpinçon Bather, in the foreground playing the guitar, to the figure on the right with her hands behind her neck that picks up on a study of his first wife, Madeleine Chapelle (1815) to a reference to Angelica tied to the rock, to conclude with another nude, with her the face resting on a hand, inspired by his second wife, Delphine Ramel. Like an artistic testament, the women, inspiring muses, present themselves in a complete “review” that confirms how, beyond the various models, Ingres’ ideal of beauty was one and constant through the years: Raphael’s model of the Fornarina.