Ingres

by A. J. Finberg

At a very early age his father began to teach him drawing and music. He first achieved success as a violinist in the salon of the bishop, but he was at least equally precocious with his pencil. Towards the age of twelve he was taken to Toulouse. He was at first placed with the painter Vigan, and worked under his direction at the Académie Royale. Then he went to the atelier of Roques, where he made rapid progress. It was in Roques’s studio that Ingres was converted to what he called “the religion of Raphael.” Roques had brought back with him from Rome a number of copies of the works of the great painters of the Renaissance, among them one of Raphael’s “Vierge à la Chaise.” Ingres was so impressed by the beauty of this work that he is said to have burst into tears before it. The instruction at the Toulouse Academy, with its insistence on minute accuracy of drawing, also had a great influence on his future career. At the end of his life Ingres, when talking of his early studies at Toulouse, was fond of affirming that he was still “what the little Ingres of twelve years had been.”

At the age of eighteen he was sent to Paris, and had the good fortune—it was his own expression—to be admitted to the studio of Louis David. He quickly gained the esteem of his master, and is said to have been employed to paint the accessories in David’s famous portrait of Madame Récamier. But their good understanding did not last long. Ingres competed for the Grand Prix de Rome in 1799, and David awarded the prize to Granger, an older pupil of his, while Ingres, to his great indignation, was only awarded the second prize. His picture was burnt during the Commune. The following year Ingres carried off the prize. The subject was “Achilles receiving in his Tent the Envoys of Agamemnon.” Flaxman, the English sculptor and illustrator of Homer, spoke so flatteringly of Ingres’ picture that, according to M. Delaborde, his master’s hostility was still further increased. This painting, which is still preserved at the École des Beaux-Arts, shows the young man’s power of vivid and accurate drawing and his respect for the teachings of his master. But under its external conformity to David’s principles it is possible to trace the germs of an originality which was soon to separate the pupil, almost in spite of himself, from the school of his master. For while David admitted the direct imitation of nature only in his portraits and studies of the nude, he insisted on giving the first place to the search for the grand style in his historical compositions.

Already in this picture we see that Ingres was constitutionally incapable of sacrificing on any grounds his unconscious desire to imitate closely, of copying nature. In vain he tries to force himself to attain “style” in the group he has imagined. His group is not harmoniously arranged. It has no vital unity. Each of the figures appeared detached from the others; but they are drawn individually with so much realistic exactitude that the whole has the bizarre aspect of a photograph of an assembly of artists’ models trying different poses in a studio.

As M. de Wyzewa has well said, the young painter had received from heaven at his birth a defect and a quality which remained intimately connected with each other. The defect was a total absence of imagination, invention, or aptitude to raise himself above the reality directly offered to the painter by the sight present to his eyes; and the quality—the very excess of which was the inevitable cause of the defect I have just denoted—the quality was a marvellous, an absolutely exceptional power of seeing, of understanding, and of reproducing that reality. No painter has ever had a more exact vision of the human figure, nor hands more skilful to fix in its entirety on the paper or the canvas what his eyes saw. A Holbein even, with all the fidelity of his realism, was still troubled in his observation of the model by a shade of æsthetic idealism, by the preoccupation of an example to be followed, or by a new process to employ: between Dominique Ingres and his model, so long as he had this model in front of his eyes, no consideration of any kind could interpose itself. The painter was as possessed by his vision, as hypnotised by it, and he was forced to copy it without changing anything. He carried away, indeed, as the result of his stay in David’s studio, a body of doctrines to which he remained on the whole faithful all his life, but nature had given him gifts which were entirely different from those which were needed to put these doctrines into practice. And this explains why this great man, in the ignorance he always remained in of the real source of his originality and greatness, presents to us to-day the paradox of having been the most naturalistic of French painters, while obstinately attempting to make himself the most idealistic.

PLATE III.—MADEMOISELLE RIVIÈRE
(In the Louvre)

This is the portrait of the “ravishing daughter” of Monsieur and Madame Rivière already referred to.

Having gained the much-coveted Prix de Rome, Ingres ought to have started at once for Italy. But the state of the public treasury was so miserable at this period of wars and internal crises that the young painter had to remain in Paris for five years before the funds for his journey were forthcoming. He was allotted apartments, together with other artists, in a deserted Capuchin convent in Paris, where he resumed his studies and undertook any work that was offered to him. The only official encouragement he received was an order to paint two portraits of Napoleon. The first of these portraits was finished in 1805—the “Bonaparte, First Consul,” for the town of Lille; the second, of “Napoleon, Emperor,” for the Hôtel des Invalides, was finished in the following year. To those years of anxious suspense belong the first ideas of many of the works which were afterwards to make him famous. The dominant influences noticeable in his designs are said to be the works of Flaxman and the paintings on antique Greek vases. The neighbouring studio at the convent was occupied by de Gros, who was engaged upon a series of immense canvases consecrated to the glory of Napoleon’s campaign in Egypt. It was filled with Oriental bric-à-brac, damascened arms, costumes, Persian rugs, Turkish pipes, and hangings of gold and silk—everything, in short, which would help the artist to paint the accessories of his pictures. It was in this studio that Ingres probably painted the studies of Eastern carpets, mosaics, &c., which are still preserved at the Museum of Montauban, and which he used afterwards in the “Odalisques.” But the real strength of his personality is best seen in the series of portraits Ingres painted at this time. The first was a portrait of his father, who came to visit him in Paris in 1801. As was his custom, he worked on this in the following years, which explains the date, 1804, inscribed upon the painting. It was exhibited at the Salon in 1806, and is now at Montauban. Then he painted the portrait of himself which is now at the Museum of Chantilly. These were followed by the three portraits of the Rivière family, now in the Louvre. Two of these, those of the mother and daughter, have been reproduced in the present volume.

Towards the end of 1806 Ingres was at length supplied with the necessary funds to proceed to Rome. Once established in the Villa Medici fortune began to smile on him. He received several important official commissions. His talent also found private appreciators. The General Miollis, a fanatical admirer of Virgil; M. de Norvins, M. Marcotte; ladies like Madame de Lavalette, Madame Forgeot, and Madame Devauçay, gave him orders for portraits and pictures. Joachim Murat, then King of Naples, also took an interest in the young painter who had been born in the same province as himself. He commissioned the “Dormeuse de Naples” and the “Grande Odalisque,” and invited him to his Court to paint portraits of the members of his family.

So flourishing did the young artist’s affairs look that he resolved to face the responsibilities of marriage. He authorised a friend, a M. Loréal, an employé of the French Government in Rome, to find him a wife. M. Loréal’s choice fell upon a Mlle. Magdaleine Chapelle, a young Frenchwoman of about the same age as the artist, who was then acting as cashier in a café at Guéret. M. Boyer d’Agen has recently published a letter from the young fiancée to her sister announcing the approaching marriage. It is dated 30th August 1813. She starts by saying that just as she was beginning to despair of ever finding a suitable husband “they had written to her from Rome saying they had found exactly what she wanted.” “You can judge of the pleasure the news gave me,” she exclaims quite frankly, “and it made me feel ten years younger, so that I now look only twenty years of age.” She promises to send her sister a portrait of her future husband on another occasion, but says that for the present she must be satisfied with a verbal description. “He is a good-looking young man. I always said my husband must be handsome.” “He is a painter—not a house-painter, but a great painter of history, a great talent. He earns from ten to twelve thousand livres a year. You see that with that we shall not die of hunger. He has a good character, and is very gentle. He is neither a drinker, a gambler, nor a rake. He has no faults. He promises to make me very happy, and I love to believe he will.”