His funeral was held three days afterwards. An immense crowd followed the hearse which conveyed his remains from his home on the Quai Voltaire, Paris, to the Church of St. Thomas Aquinas, where the services were held, and thence to the cemetery of Père-Lachaise, where he was laid to rest.
In addition to the honors which had been conferred upon Ingres by his own country, he had been elected a member of the Academies of Florence, Amsterdam, Antwerp, Berlin, and Vienna; had been made a Chevalier of the Order of Civil Merit of Prussia; a Commander of the Order of Leopold of Belgium; a Chevalier of the Order of St. Joseph of Tuscany; and had received the grand cross of the Order of Guadaloupe.
[The Art of Ingres]
CHARLES BLANC
'GAZETTE DES BEAUX-ARTS' 1868
We have heard eminent artists, who in other respects admired Ingres, deplore the influence he exercised upon the French school of painting by reason of the despotic nature of his teaching and the fact that his eccentric sayings, regarded as they were as oracular, unfortunately carried with them in the eyes of his prejudiced followers all the weight of serious opinions. Such criticism has given us food for thought, and it is not without having duly considered it that we now express our views regarding Ingres and the rôle he played as leader of the French school....
The violent reaction of the romanticists against the too-sculptural tendencies of David led, as all reactions do lead, to another extreme. Arriving in France, as he did after his sojourn in Italy, in the midst of the fray, Ingres saw with astonishing clearness in what respects the school of David had erred, and also what justice there was at bottom in the revolt of the romanticists. He saw that in a generalization of form, in an adoption of the type of statues, of the Greek profile, and of sculpturesque draperies, a cold and conventional quality had been imparted to the painting of his former co-disciples. Struck by what was natural, interesting, and essentially naïve in the work of the Italian artists of the fifteenth century, he felt that true style was only to be obtained from a profound study of nature, which alone produces an endless variety of forms; that any general type of beauty must be modified by a reference to the individual—if need be, even by characteristic ugliness—and that, finally, universal truth could be attained only by a treatment of individual truth. In this he was more of a painter than David; he reformed the reform of his master.
Ingres, then, was the first to have a conception of actual truth; the first to know that in art the ideal is the quintessence of the real; that style should be derived not from erudition, but from life; that it may be acquired from the most commonplace models; that it must be human....
In leading the French school back to a study of nature, he purged it from two evils, called in the language of the studios chic and poncif. The first signifies the fashion of painting from memory, from practice, without consulting nature. The second signifies the habit of repeating forms learned by heart. From these two banes of art Ingres delivered painting in France, thereby rendering it an inestimable service. While giving satisfaction to the romanticists in recognizing that their reaction was to some extent justifiable, he perceived at the same time, and just as clearly, that romanticism was a return to the decadence. Indeed, since it had burst into being, only those painters were admired who, essentially imitators, were called in Italy naturalisti. Caravaggio, Ribera, Guercino, Zurbaran, Manfredi, Solimena—all were lauded. Nothing was talked of but "solid painting," "solidity of technique," "painting with a full brush." The sublime beauties of fresco were forgotten, as were the men who had found expression in the grand, the universal art of design. It seemed, forsooth, as if art had begun in the seventeenth century, for in the estimation of these innovators the first of all masters, after Veronese, was Rubens, and according to them Rubens had but one equal—Rembrandt. What they admired in Rembrandt, however, was not exactly his genius, his poetic invention, and the delicacy of his marvelously expressive drawing; but the freedom, the boldness, of his style, the so-called secrets of his etchings, the intensity of his famous lights, contrasting with the transparency of his underpainting—all the alchemy of his mysterious methods.
From these departures from the established methods of the French school Ingres in his turn reacted, and as he was convinced that he was right and was by nature violent, he reacted with conviction and with violence. He loved nature but not naturalism. He was willing that his pupils should salute Rubens, but they must not pause before him in the Louvre, but pass on to Perugino, Raphael, Leonardo da Vinci, Fra Bartolommeo, Andrea del Sarto. All beautiful variations of color were to his mind inferior to the eloquence of form. The affectation of searching for effect seemed to him a means of degrading painting to the level of the theatrical. To the decorators of Venice he preferred the draftsmen of Florence; to Delacroix, he preferred Ingres.