Part 1

MASTERPIECES IN COLOUR EDITED BY - - T. LEMAN HARE

INGRES

(1778-1867)

“MASTERPIECES IN COLOUR” SERIES

ARTIST. AUTHOR. VELAZQUEZ. S. L. BENSUSAN. REYNOLDS. S. L. BENSUSAN. TURNER. C. LEWIS HIND. ROMNEY. C. LEWIS HIND. GREUZE. ALYS EVRE MACKLIN. BOTTICELLI. HENRY B. BINNS. ROSSETTI. LUCIEN PISSARRO. BELLINI. GEORGE HAY. FRA ANGELICO. JAMES MASON. REMBRANDT. JOSEF ISRAELS. LEIGHTON. A. LYS BALDRY. RAPHAEL. PAUL G. KONODY. HOLMAN HUNT. MARY E. COLERIDGE. TITIAN. S. L. BENSUSAN. MILLAIS. A. LYS BALDRY. CARLO DOLCI. GEORGE HAY. GAINSBOROUGH. MAX ROTHSCHILD. TINTORETTO. S. L. BENSUSAN. LUINI. JAMES MASON. FRANZ HALS. EDGCUMBE STALEY. VAN DYCK. PERCY M. TURNER. LEONARDO DA VINCI. M. W. BROCKWELL. RUBENS. S. L. BENSUSAN. WHISTLER. T. MARTIN WOOD. HOLBEIN. S. L. BENSUSAN. BURNE-JONES. A. LYS BALDRY. VIGÉE LE BRUN. C. HALDANE MACFALL. CHARDIN. PAUL G. KONODY. FRAGONARD. C. HALDANE MACFALL. MEMLINC. W. H. J. & J. C. WEALE. CONSTABLE. C. LEWIS HIND. RAEBURN. JAMES L. CAW. JOHN S. SARGENT. T. MARTIN WOOD. LAWRENCE. S. L. BENSUSAN. DÜRER. H. E. A. FURST. MILLET. PERCY M. TURNER. WATTEAU. C. LEWIS HIND. HOGARTH. C. LEWIS HIND. MURILLO. S. L. BENSUSAN. WATTS. W. LOFTUS HARE. INGRES. A. J. FINBERG. _Others in Preparation._

INGRES

BY A. J. FINBERG

ILLUSTRATED WITH EIGHT REPRODUCTIONS IN COLOUR

LONDON: T. C. & E. C. JACK NEW YORK: FREDERICK A. STOKES CO.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Plate

I. La Vierge à l’Hostie Frontispiece In the Louvre

Page II. Madame Rivière 14 In the Louvre

III. Mademoiselle Rivière 24 In the Louvre

IV. L’Apotheose d’Homere 34 In the Louvre

V. M. Bertin 40 In the Louvre

VI. Chérubini 50 In the Louvre

VII. Le Duc d’Orléans 60 Musée de Versailles

VIII. Jeanne d’Arc 70 In the Louvre

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 municipal elections 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. And nature there does nothing to soften the heart or the manners of man. The soil is dusty on the surface and hard to dig. The local colour is sombre, the general aspect of things sad. In the cold, dull light the forms detach themselves without grace or sympathy. The people have squat, thick-set figures, with round heads and heavy jaws. Their souls are as sombre and hard as their faces. They have ardour, but it is all concentrated and suppressed, burning within them like a brazier without flames. They show an extreme eagerness for work and gain; a silent obstinacy is the leading trait of their character. Ingres’ mother belonged to these 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. In contrast with the sterile and rocky regions of the North, the plains of Languedoc, with their great river and verdant meadows, seem a land of joy and enchantment. It was at Toulouse, with its courts of love, its floral fêtes, its contests of song and poetry, that Ingres’ father was born. If we may judge from the portrait which Ingres painted of him (it is preserved at the Museum of Montauban), his father must have been an uncommon man. As we see him in this portrait he has a fine forehead, with big black eyes, and a look full of frankness and penetration. The evidence of this portrait is confirmed by the following letter, written by Ingres towards the end of his life, to a gentleman who had asked him for information about his father:--

“Sir,--Jean-Marie-Joseph Ingres was born at Toulouse (in 1734): his father, whom I saw in my childhood, was a master tailor; he lived to a great age. My father when he was very young entered the Academy of Toulouse. He had as master, I believe, M. Lucas, a celebrated sculptor, a professor of the said Academy. Later he went to Marseille, then settled at Montauban and married my mother, Anne Moulet, on 12th August 1777. He was very much loved and appreciated by the leading families of the city and by Mgr. de Breteuil, the Bishop of Montauban, of whom he made a large medallion in profile. This bishop employed my father a great deal at his palace and in his country house, situated near the city.

“My father was born with a rare genius for the fine arts. I say the fine arts because he executed painting, sculpture, and even architecture with success. I saw him construct an important building in our principal street.

“If M. Ingres had had the same advantages which he gave his son, of going to Paris to study under the greatest of our masters, he would have been the first artist of his time. My father, who drew perfectly, painted also in miniature. He also painted views of the country from nature....

“Nothing came amiss to him. In sculpture his work ranged from the sphinxes and figures of abbés reading, which were placed in gardens, to the colossal statues of Liberty which he was forced to improvise in our temples for the Republican fêtes. He made with the greatest facility ornaments of all kinds, with which he decorated most tastefully the buildings of his time.... Finally, he attracted everybody by his lovable character, his goodness, his eminently artistic tastes. Every one was anxious to enjoy his society.

“He often went to Toulouse, his native place, to renew his strength, so to speak, in that large and beautiful city, almost as rich then in monuments of art as Rome, which it greatly resembles. He loved to find himself again with the friends of his youth, all distinguished artists. He took me often with him in these short journeys.

“Without being a musician, my father adored music, and sang very well with a tenor voice. He gave me his taste for music and made me learn to play the violin. I succeeded well enough with it to be admitted into the orchestra of the Grand Theatre of Toulouse, where I played a concerto of Viotti with success....”

In this glowing eulogy of his father there is doubtless a certain amount of pious exaggeration. The man was a true Toulousian, a fine singer, an occasional performer on the violin, an improviser in everything, with a natural gift for drawing and a plastic sense common among his compatriots. That he would have been “one of the first artists of his time” if he had had the advantage of studying in Paris is manifestly absurd. His work shows a want of vigour, of originality, of invention. He had a certain correctness of eye and skill of hand, with some taste for arrangement and effect. That was sufficient for the plaster decorations with which he was mainly occupied, and even for the little portraits in miniature or red chalk which he undertook. But he could not go beyond this, and the only attempt to paint an important picture which he made marks clearly the limits of his talent. His private life was somewhat irregular. He was a great lover of the fair sex, and towards the end of his life his wife was compelled to leave his home.

From the father, then, we may say, Ingres inherited the penetrating vivacity of his sight, the agile suppleness and surety of his fingers, and a certain voluptuous tendency which is particularly noticeable in his nudes; while his immense powers of work, his obstinacy and pugnacity, came from his mother.

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.” Roques had brought back with him from Rome a number of copies of the works of the great painters of the Renaissance, among them one of Raphael’s “Vierge à la Chaise.” Ingres was so impressed by the beauty of this work that he is said to have burst into tears before it. 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. But their good understanding did not last long. Ingres competed for the Grand Prix de Rome in 1799, and David awarded the prize to Granger, an older pupil of his, while Ingres, to his great indignation, was only awarded the second prize. His picture was burnt during the Commune. The following year Ingres carried off the prize. The subject was “Achilles receiving in his Tent the Envoys of Agamemnon.” Flaxman, the English sculptor and illustrator of Homer, spoke so flatteringly of Ingres’ picture that, according to M. Delaborde, his master’s hostility was still further increased. This painting, which is still preserved at the École des Beaux-Arts, shows the young man’s power of vivid and accurate drawing and his respect for the teachings of his master. But under its external conformity to David’s principles it is possible to trace the germs of an originality which was soon to separate the pupil, almost in spite of himself, from the school of his master. For while David admitted the direct imitation of nature only in his portraits and studies of the nude, he insisted on giving the first place to the search for the grand style in his historical compositions.

Already in this picture we see that Ingres was constitutionally incapable of sacrificing on any grounds his unconscious desire to imitate closely, of copying nature. In vain he tries to force himself to attain “style” in the group he has imagined. His group is not harmoniously arranged. It has no vital unity. Each of the figures appeared detached from the others; but they are drawn individually with so much realistic exactitude that the whole has the bizarre aspect of a photograph of an assembly of artists’ models trying different poses in a studio.

As M. de Wyzewa has well said, the young painter had received from heaven at his birth a defect and a quality which remained intimately connected with each other. The defect was a total absence of imagination, invention, or aptitude to raise himself above the reality directly offered to the painter by the sight present to his eyes; and the quality--the very excess of which was the inevitable cause of the defect I have just denoted--the quality was a marvellous, an absolutely exceptional power of seeing, of understanding, and of reproducing that reality. 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 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 painter was as possessed by his vision, as hypnotised by it, and he was forced to copy it without changing anything. He carried away, indeed, as the result of his stay in David’s studio, a body of doctrines to which he remained on the whole faithful all his life, but nature had given him gifts which were entirely different from those which were needed to put these doctrines into practice. And this explains why this great man, in the ignorance he always remained in of the real source of his originality and greatness, presents to us to-day the paradox of having been the most naturalistic of French painters, while obstinately attempting to make himself the most idealistic.

Having gained the much-coveted Prix de Rome, Ingres ought to have started at once for Italy. But the state of the public treasury was so miserable at this period of wars and internal crises that the young painter had to remain in Paris for five years before the funds for his journey were forthcoming. He was allotted apartments, together with other artists, in a deserted Capuchin convent in Paris, where he resumed his studies and undertook any work that was offered to him. The only official encouragement he received was an order to paint two portraits of Napoleon. The first of these portraits was finished in 1805--the “Bonaparte, First Consul,” for the town of Lille; the second, of “Napoleon, Emperor,” for the Hôtel des Invalides, was finished in the following year. To those years of anxious suspense belong the first ideas of many of the works which were afterwards to make him famous. The dominant influences noticeable in his designs are said to be the works of Flaxman and the paintings on antique Greek vases. The neighbouring studio at the convent was occupied by de Gros, who was engaged upon a series of immense canvases consecrated to the glory of Napoleon’s campaign in Egypt. It was filled with Oriental bric-à-brac, damascened arms, costumes, Persian rugs, Turkish pipes, and hangings of gold and silk--everything, in short, which would help the artist to paint the accessories of his pictures. It was in this studio that Ingres probably painted the studies of Eastern carpets, mosaics, &c., which are still preserved at the Museum of Montauban, and which he used afterwards in the “Odalisques.” But the real strength of his personality is best seen in the series of portraits Ingres painted at this time. The first was a portrait of his father, who came to visit him in Paris in 1801. As was his custom, he worked on this in the following years, which explains the date, 1804, inscribed upon the painting. It was exhibited at the Salon in 1806, and is now at Montauban. Then he painted the portrait of himself which is now at the Museum of Chantilly. These were followed by the three portraits of the Rivière family, now in the Louvre. Two of these, those of the mother and daughter, have been reproduced in the present volume.

Towards the end of 1806 Ingres was at length supplied with the necessary funds to proceed to Rome. Once established in the Villa Medici fortune began to smile on him. He received several important official commissions. His talent also found private appreciators. The General Miollis, a fanatical admirer of Virgil; M. de Norvins, M. Marcotte; ladies like Madame de Lavalette, Madame Forgeot, and Madame Devauçay, gave him orders for portraits and pictures. Joachim Murat, then King of Naples, also took an interest in the young painter who had been born in the same province as himself. He commissioned the “Dormeuse de Naples” and the “Grande Odalisque,” and invited him to his Court to paint portraits of the members of his family.

So flourishing did the young artist’s affairs look that he resolved to face the responsibilities of marriage. He authorised a friend, a M. Loréal, an employé of the French Government in Rome, to find him a wife. M. Loréal’s choice fell upon a Mlle. Magdaleine Chapelle, a young Frenchwoman of about the same age as the artist, who was then acting as cashier in a café at Guéret. M. Boyer d’Agen has recently published a letter from the young fiancée to her sister announcing the approaching marriage. It is dated 30th August 1813. She starts by saying that just as she was beginning to despair of ever finding a suitable husband “they had written to her from Rome saying they had found exactly what she wanted.” “You can judge of the pleasure the news gave me,” she exclaims quite frankly, “and it made me feel ten years younger, so that I now look only twenty years of age.” 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 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. 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. They met near the Tomb of Nero. It was there that Ingres first took the hand of the partner who was to caress and console him during the next thirty-five years. 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. In a letter to his friend Gelibert, dated 7th July 1818, Ingres complains that he has been able to put nothing aside, that he has to live, as it were, from day to day. He admits he has several orders on hand for pictures, but “as I paint only to paint well, I take a long time over them, and consequently earn little.” His chief resource was the making of chalk or pencil portraits, for which his usual price was twenty-five francs. 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.