The writer of this charming letter was married to the artist about three months after it was written. The marriage was arranged entirely by the friends of the young couple. They had not set eyes on each other before Ingres went to the city gates to meet his affianced bride. They met near the Tomb of Nero. It was there that Ingres first took the hand of the partner who was to caress and console him during the next thirty-five years. This charming and laughing “fille à Madame Angot” turned out to be the admirable companion which every artist dreams of but so rarely possesses: one who will share all his hopes, but never his doubts; who believes and admires, smiles and is patient, and accepts all sacrifices for the glory of the one she loves.
Almost immediately after his marriage Ingres’ luck changed. Murat was overthrown in 1814. His successor refused all the pictures that had been commissioned from Ingres, and those which had been finished were sold although the artist had not been paid for them. In a letter to his friend Gelibert, dated 7th July 1818, Ingres complains that he has been able to put nothing aside, that he has to live, as it were, from day to day. He admits he has several orders on hand for pictures, but “as I paint only to paint well, I take a long time over them, and consequently earn little.” His chief resource was the making of chalk or pencil portraits, for which his usual price was twenty-five francs. But after each portrait, as his wife told a friend in after years, Ingres declared that he would not do any more, that he was a painter of history, not a draughtsman of the faces of the middle classes. “Nevertheless,” she added, “it was necessary to live, and M. Ingres took up his pencil again.” But as even this slender resource began to fail him at Rome, he resolved to leave that city and take up his residence at Florence, where his friend Bartolini, the sculptor, was already settled.
PLATE IV.—L’APOTHEOSE D’HOMERE
(In the Louvre)
This large and famous picture was commissioned to fill the ceiling of one of the galleries of the Louvre. It is signed “Ingres pingbat, anno 1827.” It cost the master more research and trouble than any of his other works. This is proved by the number of painted studies, some of them superior to the finished picture itself, and the repeated references to it in his letters and note-books. Homer is being crowned by Victory, and the two beautiful female figures seated at his feet represent the Iliad and the Odyssey. Around Homer are the painters, sculptors, and musicians whom the artist wished to glorify. “To his great regret,” he said he felt compelled to exclude Goethe, because he found too many “faults” in his writings. But Shakespeare and Pope were admitted. In his last version of this subject, made in 1865, Shakespeare was also finally expelled.
To this period of Ingres’ first sojourn in Rome (from the end of 1806 to 1820) belong some of the artist’s finest and most personal works. We must give the first place to his portraits. The delicious portrait of Madame Aymon, known as “La Belle Zélie” (now in the Museum of Rouen), was immediately followed by what is on all hands regarded as his most beautiful work of this kind. This is the “Madame Devauçay,” of the Museum of Chantilly. It is an admirable example of Ingres’ wonderful power of concentration and absorption in the thing seen. Disdaining the help of accessories, he draws all his inspiration from the face and figure of his model. He seizes the personality of his sitter with so much completeness and such perfect sympathy and understanding, and places it on the canvas with so much authority and power, that the portrait of the individual takes on all the scope of a permanent and absolute type. The portrait of “Madame de Sénonnes” (now in the Museum of Nantes), which was painted about 1810, has the same intensity of spirit as the “Madame Devauçay,” and the same exquisite perfection of modelling and design. It is also marked by greater ease and freedom of handling, a sign of the young master’s growing confidence in his own genius. It is generally regarded as Ingres’ masterpiece of feminine portraiture.
The well-known “Œdipus and the Sphinx” was painted in 1808, while the artist was still a pensioner of the School of Rome. It is hard for us to understand the horror and dislike which this picture provoked among the leading spirits of the school of David. What seems to us a typical example of classic art struck the official representatives of Classicism as the work of a revolutionary. In his report on this picture, M. Lethière, the director of the School of Rome, regrets that M. Ingres, in spite of his talent, has failed to grasp the secret of the “grand and noble style of the great masters of the Roman school.” To appreciate the originality and daring of this work, we must compare the figure of Œdipus with that of the Roman heroes in David’s “Rape of the Sabines.” David’s figures are all cast in the same mould. All the particularities of the individual model are ruthlessly eliminated. When we turn from the vague and empty generalisations of David, Regnault, Gérard and Girodet, and look at the narrow forehead, the pugnacious upper lip, the prominent cheek-bones, the deep-sunk eye and the bushy eyebrows of Ingres’ figure, we may begin to understand that the gulf which yawns between the two kinds of Idealism—the abstract idealism of the Davidian school and the concrete idealism of Ingres—is quite as wide and impassable as that which separates them both from Romanticism and Naturalism.
PLATE V.—M. BERTIN
(In the Louvre)