artist details

Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres (1780 - 1867)

French Neoclassical Painter

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.

Ingres was born in Montauban, Tarn-et-Garonne, France on the 29th of August 1780, the first of seven children (five of whom survived infancy) of Jean-Marie-Joseph Ingres (1755-1814) and his wife Anne Moulet (1758-1817). His father was a successful jack-of-all-trades in the arts, a painter of miniatures, sculptor, decorative stonemason, and amateur musician; his mother was the nearly illiterate daughter of a master wigmaker.

From his father the young Ingres received early encouragement and instruction in drawing and music, and his first known drawing, a study after an antique cast, was made in 1789. Starting in 1786 he attended the local school, Ecole des Frères de l'Education Chrétienne, but his education was disrupted by the turmoil of the French Revolution, and the closing of the school in 1791 marked the end of his conventional education. The deficiency of his schooling, and the consequent difficulty he experienced in expressing himself through speaking and writing, would always remain for him a source of insecurity.

In c.1791, Joseph Ingres took his son to Toulouse, where the young Jean Auguste Dominique was enrolled in the Académie Royale de Peinture, Sculpture et Architecture. There he studied under the sculptor Jean-Pierre Vigan, the landscape painter Jean Briant, and—most importantly—the painter Joseph Roques, who imparted to the young artist his veneration of Raphael. Ingres's musical talent was further developed under the tutelage of the violinist Lejeune. From the ages of thirteen to sixteen he was second violinist in the Orchestre du Capitole de Toulouse, and to the end of his long life Ingres retained a passion for music and continued to play the violin as an avocation.

Having been awarded first prize in drawing by the Academy, in August 1797 he traveled to Paris to study with Jacques-Louis David, France's—and Europe's—leading painter during the revolutionary period, in whose studio he remained for four years. Ingres followed his master's neoclassical example but revealed, according to David, "a tendency toward exaggeration in his studies." He was admitted to the Painting Department of the École des Beaux-Arts in October 1799, and won—after tying for second place in 1800—the Grand Prix de Rome in 1801 for his Ambassadors of Agamemnon in the tent of Achilles. His trip to Rome, however, was postponed until 1806, when the financially strained government finally appropriated the travel funds.

Working in Paris alongside several other students of David in a studio provided by the state, he made his debut at the Salon in 1802 with a Portrait of a Woman (current whereabouts unknown). The following year brought a prestigious commission, when Ingres was selected (along with Jean-Baptiste Greuze, Robert Lefévre, Charles Meynier, and Marie-Guilhemine Benoist) to paint five full-length portraits of Napoleon Bonaparte as First Consul. These were to be distributed to the prefectural towns of Liège, Anvers, Dunkerque, Brussels, and Gand, all of which were newly ceded to France in the Treaty of Lunéville of 1801.

In the summer of 1806 Ingres became engaged to Marie-Anne-Julie Forestier, a painter and musician, before leaving for Rome in September. Although he had hoped to stay in Paris long enough to witness the opening of that year's Salon, in which he was to display several works, he reluctantly left for Italy just days before the opening. At the Salon, his paintings—Self-Portrait, portraits of the Rivière family, and Napoleon I on his Imperial Throne—produced a disturbing impression on the public, due not only to Ingres's stylistic idiosyncrasies but also for the implications of his adoption of Carolingian imagery in representing Napoleon. David delivered a severe judgement, and the critics were uniformly hostile. Chaussard (Le Pausanias Français, 1806) condemned Ingres's style as gothic and asked: "How, with so much talent, a line so flawless, an attention to detail so thorough, has M. Ingres succeeded in painting a bad picture? The answer is that he wanted to do something singular, something extraordinary.... M. Ingres's intention is nothing less than to make art regress by four centuries, to carry us back to its infancy, to revive the manner of Jean de Bruges." The points on which Chaussard and other critics laid stress were the strange discordances of colour, the want of sculptural relief, the chilly precision of contour, and the self-consciously archaic quality.