It has been said of Ingres that he was a Greek who had strayed from antiquity into our own times. We know, however, that nature does not produce geniuses at haphazard, but that every great creator expresses the thoughts, ideas, and aspirations of his time. Ingres was no exception to this law. Not only was he the child of his century, but he was its representative, both in the classic reaction and the romantic impulse; and as in his well-balanced mind the two tendencies were modified one by the other, the result was this great and harmonious genius which is on a plane superior to the feelings and passions of his epoch, into which, nevertheless, his intrepid spirit boldly plunged.—FROM THE FRENCH
RICHARD MUTHER
'THE HISTORY OF MODERN PAINTING'
I doubt whether up to the present time any one has rightly understood the mysterious figure of Ingres, of the man who in his youth was enraptured by "the spirit, the grace, the originality of Watteau and the delicious color of his pictures," and who, at a later time, not because of incapacity, but out of deliberate intention, introduced discords of color into his paintings; of this classicist par excellence, who is counted among the greatest artists, in the familiar and graceful style, who are recorded in the history of art.
Like David, Ingres has survived as a portrait-painter only. Like him, when he found himself face to face with nature, he relented, and forgot the strict system which he had elaborated for his great pictures. He has painted portraits which imprint themselves on the memory like medals, struck in metallic sharpness. Here too he is unequal, often cold and commonplace, but more frequently quite admirable. In these paintings, cast as it were in bronze, there is something that comes from the fresh original source of all art; they have that vein of realism by which the vigorous idealism of Raphael is distinguished from the conventional idealism of a professor of historical painting. Here one finds real treasures, creations of remarkable vital power, and in admirable taste. They show that Ingres, apparently so systematic, had a profound love for living nature, and they insure the immortality of his name. His historical pictures are works which compel our esteem, but his portraits are splendid creations which can truly stand comparison with the great old masters....
In Holbein's portraits the whole German community of his time has been handed down to us; in those of Van Dyck, the aristocracy of England under Charles i. So also Ingres has depicted for us, with all its failings and all its virtues, the middle-class hierarchy of Louis Philippe's reign, which felt itself to be the first estate, the summit of the nation, felt sure of the morrow, was proud of itself, of its intelligence and energy, which pursued with correctness its moral course of life, revered order and hated all excess—including that of the colorists. It is this same spirit which animated Ingres himself, that splendid "bourgeois" of art. His portrait of Bertin is justly his most celebrated work; not merely the painted petrifaction of a newspaper potentate, but also one of those portraits which bring a whole epoch home to one's mind....
But however highly one must estimate the importance of such a work, Ingres is nevertheless at his highest, not in his painted likenesses, but in his portrait-drawings. In the former the raw colors are still, at times, offensive. The faces sometimes have the conventional, uniform coloring of his historical pictures, the historical tone. Almost always the flesh looks like wood, the dress like metal, blue robes like steel. His drawings, however, are to be admired without criticism. Ingres lived in his youth, at Rome, as a drawer of portraits. For eight scudi he did the bust, for twelve the whole figure, raging inwardly the while at being kept from "great art" by such journeyman-work.
In these pieces an artistic eye which was now inexorable, now tender and full of fancy, has looked on nature, and, in flowing pencil-strokes, has caught with spirit and with the certain touch of direct feeling the real fulness of life in what he saw. These drawings show that "Father Ingres" possessed not only a highly cultivated intelligence and iron strength of will, not only the genius of industry, but also a heart, a genuine, warm, and fine-feeling heart; that he was in his innermost being by no means the cold academician, the stiff doctrinaire, which he appears to be in his large pictures, and which his opposition to the romantic school made of him. Here we have a charmer such as the Primitives were, a charmer such as the Impressionists are, like Massys and Manet, like Dürer and Degas, like all who have looked nature in the face. And while these drawings, at once occasional and austere, place him as a draftsman on a level with the greatest masters in the history of art, they also show him, the reactionary, as at the same time a man of progress, as the connecting link between the great art of the first half and the familiar art which rules over the second half of the nineteenth century.
[The Works of Ingres]
DESCRIPTIONS OF THE PLATES