A. J. Finberg

“ 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. ”

“ Others are indignant with her, like the young man who picks up a stone to throw at her, or like the soldier behind the centurion who turns towards her a face full of astonishment and irritation. A young woman presses her child in her arms in shuddering protestation. Others look at the man who is about to die for his faith. ”

“ We must confess that Ingres has found a worthy plastic formula to express his highly abstract conception. He shows us the poets, painters, sculptors, philosophers, and great patrons of the arts grouped round the seat of the old blind poet. Each individual face, each gesture and pose, has been studied and thought out patiently, and executed with masterly skill. The terrible problem of grouping together so many different personalities and so many costumes of widely differing periods has been faced and overcome. The whole produces an effect of incomparable simplicity and grandeur. ”

“ At this moment in the chamber of death a young woman enters. She is young, charming, and melancholy. She is the second wife of the heart-broken father, the mother-in-law of the dying son. And as she walks through the room with languishing steps the physician guesses the horrible truth. The man on the bed is dying of love. ”

“ By signs which cannot deceive him, the man of science has divined the dreadful passion of the son for his father’s wife. Such was, in fact, the history of Stratonice. The second wife of Seleucus Nicanor was loved by Antiochus, the king’s son by his first marriage. The doctor, Erasistratus, having surprised this secret, declared that the young man would certainly die if Stratonice was not given to him, and his father’s love [Pg 66] was great enough to enable him to make this sacrifice.
No other artist than Ingres could have placed this poignant drama on canvas without exciting ridicule. ”

“ No painter has ever had a more exact vision of the human figure, nor hands more skilful to fix in its entirety on the paper or the canvas what his eyes saw. A Holbein even, with all the fidelity of his realism, was still troubled in his observation of the model by a shade of æsthetic idealism, by the preoccupation of [Pg 25] an example to be followed, or by a new process to employ: between Dominique Ingres and his model, so long as he had this model in front of his eyes, no consideration of any kind could interpose itself. ”

“ The hopeless tragedy of the situation is admirably expressed without a trace of theatrical exaggeration. We see a young man, suffering from a grave and mysterious malady, extended upon his bed of suffering. ”

“ The instruction at the Toulouse Academy, with its insistence on minute accuracy of drawing, also had a great influence on his future career. At the end of his life Ingres, when talking of his early studies at Toulouse, was fond of affirming that he was still “what the little Ingres of twelve years had been.”
At the age of eighteen he was sent to Paris, and had the good fortune—it was his own expression—to be admitted to the studio of Louis David. He quickly gained the esteem of his master, and is said to have been employed to paint the accessories in David’s famous portrait of Madame Récamier. ”

“ 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 [Pg 37] power, that the portrait of the individual takes on all the scope of a permanent and absolute type. ”

“ At a very early age his father began to teach him drawing and music. He first achieved success as a violinist in the salon of the bishop, but he was at least equally precocious with his pencil. Towards the age of twelve he was taken to Toulouse. He was at first placed with the painter Vigan, and worked under his direction at the Académie Royale. Then he went to the atelier of Roques, where he made rapid progress. It was in Roques’s studio that Ingres was converted to what he called “the religion of Raphael.” ”

“ Years flew by, and the artist’s enthusiasm cooled. The noble Duke and the sensitive and proud painter could not get along well under the same roof. Ingres thought himself slighted on one occasion (in 1850) and brusquely threw up the commission, leaving his work unfinished. There exists of this gigantic work only a sketch at Dampierre, an infinite number of drawings at the Museum of Montauban, and a little painting executed [Pg 74] from these drawings in 1862, a very feeble representation of what the definitive work would have been. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 [Pg 38] typical example of classic art struck the official representatives of Classicism as the work of a revolutionary. ”

“ Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres was born on the 29th August 1778, at Montauban. A stranger birthplace for a great artist could hardly be found. All the passion not absorbed in the material cares of life there turns to fanaticism. Religious hatred runs high. ”

“ The amount of work involved in making the preparatory studies and carrying through a work of such importance was enormous, and Ingres had never before displayed so much energy and decision. The conception of the picture was a noble one. It was to represent the spiritual ties which bind one generation of human beings to the other; to insist on the debt which each worker in the field of art and thought owes to his predecessors ”

“ She promises to send her sister a portrait of her future husband on another occasion, but says that for the present she must be satisfied [Pg 31] with a verbal description. “He is a good-looking young man. I always said my husband must be handsome.” “He is a painter—not a house-painter, but a great painter of history, a great talent. ”

“ To us, living as we do [Pg 56] in a perfect anarchy of taste, it is rather difficult to understand why this picture should have scandalised and alarmed the artists and public of the time. The artist was accused of exaggeration, of an abuse of power. Since Michael Angelo they had never seen in painting such muscles as those of the arms and legs of the lictors who are taking the saint to his place of torture. The whole effect, Ingres’ critics said, was forced and improbable. ”

“ They show an extreme eagerness for work and gain; a silent obstinacy is the leading trait of their character. Ingres’ mother belonged to these [Pg 11] parts and to this race, and from her he seems to have derived a part of his stormy and inflexible, his unquiet and haughty genius.
Ingres’ father came from Toulouse. Little more than three miles separate Toulouse from Montauban, but the chain of little hills which throws off, to the left, the river Garonne, and to the right the Tarn and the Aveyron, serves as the dividing line of two profoundly different regions and races. ”

“ The municipal elections [Pg 10] are fought out on religious grounds. Protestant and Roman Catholic hate but do not know one another. Each family lives for itself and by itself. A visit is said to be considered as an indiscretion. ”

“ Each party pursued the other without mercy, neither disdaining to use any kind of weapon that came to hand.
Fortified by the homage offered to him, Ingres returned to his work with renewed ardour. The King asked him to paint a portrait of the Duke of Orleans, and Ingres, grateful for the Duke’s kindness with regard to the “Stratonice,” took much more pains over this portrait than he usually took with commissions of this kind. This was the last male portrait that [Pg 71] Ingres painted, with the exception of a small monochrome medallion of the Prince Jéròme Napoléon, which he executed in 1855. ”

“ He earns from ten to twelve thousand livres a year. You see that with that we shall not die of hunger. He has a good character, and is very gentle. He is neither a drinker, a gambler, nor a rake. He has no faults. He promises to make me very happy, and I love to believe he will.”
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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ One of the grand medals was given to him by the unanimous votes of the artists, and the Emperor made him an officer of the Legion of Honour.
Then, in the following year, as if to crown his career by the evocation of a supreme masterpiece, Ingres finished the “Source,” a subject which had been begun [Pg 78] at the same time as the “Venus Anadyomene.” ”