Soon after painting his 'Œdipus' he began the 'Venus Anadyomene' which was finished many years later. These works were followed by some of his finest portraits, and, in 1811, he completed 'Jupiter and Thetis,' a large canvas now in the Museum of Aix. 'Romulus and Acron' and 'Virgil reading the Æneid' followed; then came 'The Betrothal of Raphael,' 'Don Pedro kissing the Sword of Henry iv.', 'The Sistine Chapel,' and 'The Large Odalisque.' 'The Death of Leonardo da Vinci' and 'Henry iv. and the Spanish Ambassador' were painted in 1817; 'Roger liberating Angelica' and 'Francesca da Rimini' were finished two years later. But whatever the subject or the treatment, none of his works found favor in France. The classicists looked upon him as a renegade from their ranks, and, strangely enough, it was only by Delacroix and a few others of the so-called romanticists (regarded by Ingres with openly expressed abhorrence) that the merit of his works seems at that time to have been recognized.
As year after year passed by, and neither reputation nor money rewarded his efforts, the cold indifference and neglect of his country were keenly felt by him. He was, however, so firmly convinced that his methods were the true ones—that for an attainment of the highest style an artist must turn to nature, and that color and effect should be wholly subordinate to beauty of line—that, even when sore pressed and in the utmost need, he never deviated from his path in order to cater to popular prejudice and prevailing taste. "I count on my old age to avenge me," he used to say.
In 1813, when he was thirty-three, Ingres married a young French woman, Madeleine Chapelle by name, who, in a rather business-like way, had gone to Rome from her home in Montauban at the invitation of some relatives living in Italy with whom Ingres had become well acquainted, for the express purpose of becoming the artist's wife. The marriage was a congenial and perfectly happy one. Madame Ingres seems from the first to have felt firm faith in her husband's genius, and he owed much to her unfailing courage and devotion. The burden of his poverty was cheerfully assumed by her; all petty annoyances, as well as serious anxieties, were kept from his knowledge so far as was possible, and with no thought but of his well-being and his peace of mind, his wife shared his trials and lightened his cares.
It was at this period that Ingres, in order to earn money enough for their daily bread, executed for slight remuneration many of those marvelous little portraits in lead-pencil (see plates iii, iv, and v) which are so exquisite in touch, so perfect in their purity of line, that they place him on a level with the most consummate draftsmen of all times. He himself seems to have regarded these little masterpieces, for they are nothing less, merely as "pot-boilers," and to have even experienced a certain sense of humiliation that his art should perforce be turned into a channel so trivial in his eyes compared with the great works his brush longed to paint. The story is told of a gentleman who one day knocked at the door of his modest studio in Rome, and when Ingres himself appeared, asked timidly, "Does the artist live here who draws portraits in lead-pencil?" "No, sir," was the angry reply; "he who lives here is a painter," and the door was slammed in the face of the astonished visitor. Yet that he did appreciate their artistic excellence is clear from the fact that when in 1855 it was proposed to hang a row of these drawings below the paintings in his exhibition of that year, he objected. "No," he said, "people would look only at them."
In 1820, after painting for one of the churches in Rome a large picture representing 'Christ giving the Keys to St. Peter' (now in the Louvre), Ingres left Rome, and, in the hope of better fortune than had so far attended him in Italy, settled in Florence. His friend and former fellow-pupil in David's studio, the sculptor Bartolini, was then living there, and did all in his power to assist him; but Bartolini's kindness served to only alleviate, not to overcome, the hardships of this residence in a city where Ingres was all but unknown, and where he was without even the scanty means of support afforded by the sale of his pencil portraits, which in Rome had been in demand by the strangers constantly passing through that city. He and his wife were indeed so poor that often they had not money enough to buy the necessary food. And yet at the time of their greatest distress he bravely rejected the proposition of a wealthy Englishman to go to England, where a fortune would be assured him by the execution of portraits in lead-pencil.
The work that chiefly occupied the artist in Florence was completing a picture entitled 'The Entry of Charles v. into Paris,' and in filling an order received from the French Administration of the Fine Arts for a large picture for the Cathedral of Montauban, representing 'The Vow of Louis xiii.' When at work upon this painting he received a visit one day from Delécluze, another fellow-pupil in the David studio, who, passing through Florence, had hunted up his old friend. Delécluze was struck by the imposing character of the picture, and urged the artist, who was discouraged and disheartened and talked of abandoning the work altogether, to complete it and send it to Paris. This was done, and when, a year later, 'The Vow of Louis xiii.' was exhibited at the famous Salon of 1824 Ingres had the gratification of knowing that at last recognition had come to him. The picture met with universal approbation, and Ingres, who now returned to France after a self-imposed exile of eighteen years, became suddenly famous. At Montauban he was received with enthusiasm; in Paris he was decorated with the badge of the Legion of Honor, and in the following year, 1825, was elected to the Institute of France.
The French government now commissioned him to execute a ceiling decoration for one of the galleries of the Louvre. The result was 'The Apotheosis of Homer,' the greatest of all his subject-pictures. This was in 1827, and from then on Ingres was looked upon as a leader of the French school—a chef d'école. His studio was thronged with pupils as David's once had been—the two Flandrins, Amaury-Duval, Chassériau, Lehmann, Pichon, and the brothers Balze were among the number—and with authority only less despotic than that of his former master, he ruled the band of young artists who regarded him with such admiration and reverence that they brooked no adverse criticism of him whom they felt to be the deliverer from the bondage of the severe classicism of David, and, at the same time, the opponent of that romantic reaction which was daily growing in power under the leadership of Eugène Delacroix.
Ingres himself was vehement in his denunciation of this new movement, which, diametrically opposed to the academic and the classic, rated freedom of expression and the representation of dramatic and emotional themes as superior to formal composition and impersonal, statuesque art, and held that beauty of color was of greater pictorial importance than purity of line. His animosity to Delacroix, then the leader of the romanticists, knew no bounds. He regarded him as a follower of the evil one, and could not hear his name mentioned with equanimity. Ingres was violent and prejudiced by nature, and holding as he did that "drawing was the probity of art," and that painting was but a development of sculpture, he felt that the kind of art practised by Delacroix and his school was nothing short of blasphemous. This feeling of hostility was fully reciprocated by the romanticists. Party feeling ran high and was increased by the intense partisanship shown to their leaders by the students and younger painters belonging to the opposing factions.
In 1834 Ingres' great canvas 'The Martyrdom of St. Symphorien' was exhibited at the Salon. The reception accorded it was far from what its author, who regarded it as one of his finest achievements, had counted on. Filled with anger and resentment that the same cold indifference that had greeted his early efforts was shown this picture, Ingres, in disgust, resolved to work no more for the unappreciative public, and gladly accepted the offer of the directorship of the French Academy in Rome.
During his second sojourn in Italy he produced but few works. 'The Virgin of the Host,' a portrait of Cherubini, a small version of the 'Odalisque,' and a picture of 'Stratonice' are the principal pictures of this period. His duties as Director of the Academy were conscientiously fulfilled, and in the congenial atmosphere of Rome, surrounded by his pupils, seven years passed.