[Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres]
BORN 1780: DIED 1867
FRENCH SCHOOL
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (pronounced Ang´gr) was born at Montauban in the south of France, on August 29, 1780. His father, Jean-Marie-Joseph Ingres, was by profession a house-decorator, with talents so versatile that he was also to some extent painter, sculptor, architect, and musician as well. It was he who gave the first instruction in drawing and in music to his son, who, from the outset, showed so much ability in both that it was a question which should be adopted as his life-work.
Apparently the boy received but little schooling, but before he was twelve years old had acquired such proficiency as a violinist that he was accepted as a member of the orchestra of the theater of Toulouse, where on one memorable occasion he played a concerto by Viotti so skilfully that it called forth hearty applause. Deeming music to be more remunerative than painting, his parents wished him to devote himself to it professionally. This did not, however, prevent their sending him to the painter Vigan, in Toulouse, for instruction in drawing, and under his guidance Ingres followed the course prescribed by the Academy of that city, in which Vigan was a professor. Later he entered the studio of Roques, a painter who had been associated in Rome with Vien and David, but who, while adhering to their doctrines, had devoted much time to copying the works of the great Italians of the Renaissance. The sight of these copies—above all, of one of Raphael's 'Madonna of the Chair'—revealed to Ingres his true vocation, and thenceforth no doubt existed in his mind that he would devote his life to art.
Whatever disappointment his parents may have felt to have the matter so decided, no opposition was made to his determination, and after a brief period of study under a landscape-painter—Briant, or, as M. Momméja says, Bertrand, by name—he started for Paris. There he soon obtained admission to the studio of Jacques-Louis David, then the acknowledged leader of the school of painting in France.
This was in 1796, and for the next four years Ingres worked diligently and with such effect that before long he was recognized as one of David's most promising pupils. A proof of his master's appreciation of his ability is the fact that when called upon to paint a portrait of Madame Récamier (see Masters in Art, Part 74, Vol. 7) David selected his young pupil Ingres to assist him in the work. But harmony between master and pupil was of short duration, and although to the end of his life Ingres spoke with admiration of "the great David and his great school," asserting that his teaching was established "on the severest and the truest principles," friction arose between them, so that in the competition for the grand prize of Rome in 1800, Ingres, unjustly it was said, was awarded but the second prize. In the following year David's jealousy was aroused by the praise bestowed by the English sculptor Flaxman upon the composition by Ingres of 'Achilles and the Ambassadors of Agamemnon,' which won for its author the grand prize of Rome.
Although the young painter was now entitled to a sojourn of five years in Italy, such was the reduced state of the French national finances that his departure for Rome was indefinitely postponed. In the meantime he was accorded a studio in the deserted convent of the Capuchins in Paris, where with several other artists he pursued his studies. Poor and without commissions, save a few chance orders, or a stray job for some bookseller, Ingres worked assiduously at drawings and studies in color, producing also a number of works which have since become famous—a portrait of his father, one of himself at twenty-four (now at Chantilly), portraits of Monsieur and Madame Rivière (in the Louvre), 'La belle Zélie' (Rouen Museum), two portraits of Napoleon Bonaparte, and others, in which, as Delaborde has said, "he showed, as boldly and forcibly as at the end of his career, all the strong, realistic qualities which form the basis of his art."
At length, in 1806, he was enabled to go to Italy, where he remained for eighteen years, during the first five of which he was a pensioner of the French Academy in Rome, then established in the Villa Medici. He now found himself able to study at the fountainhead both ancient and Renaissance art, and was transported by the beauty of the works of the sixteenth-century Italian painters—especially by those of Raphael, whom he always regarded as the greatest of all masters.
Ingres' work gained steadily in strength and vigor, and his individuality developed rapidly. Departing from the cold formalism of David, he turned to nature for his inspiration and gave a greater semblance of life to his figures than was in strict accordance with the code of the classicists. 'Œdipus and the Sphinx,' the first work sent by him from Rome to Paris, gave evidence that the young pensioner of the French Academy was already in possession of his powers, and that however severely he might be criticized for the singularity of his works, he was undoubtedly some one to be counted with.