Part 2

To this period of Ingres’ first sojourn in Rome (from the end of 1806 to 1820) belong some of the artist’s finest and most personal works. We must give the first place to his portraits. The delicious portrait of Madame Aymon, known as “La Belle Zélie” (now in the Museum of Rouen), was immediately followed by what is on all hands regarded as his most beautiful work of this kind. This is the “Madame Devauçay,” of the Museum of Chantilly. It is an admirable example of Ingres’ wonderful power of concentration and absorption in the thing seen. 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 power, that the portrait of the individual takes on all the scope of a permanent and absolute type. The portrait of “Madame de Sénonnes” (now in the Museum of Nantes), which was painted about 1810, has the same intensity of spirit as the “Madame Devauçay,” and the same exquisite perfection of modelling and design. 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 typical example of classic art struck the official representatives of Classicism as the work of a revolutionary. In his report on this picture, M. Lethière, the director of the School of Rome, regrets that M. Ingres, in spite of his talent, has failed to grasp the secret of the “grand and noble style of the great masters of the Roman school.” To appreciate the originality and daring of this work, we must compare the figure of Œdipus with that of the Roman heroes in David’s “Rape of the Sabines.” David’s figures are all cast in the same mould. All the particularities of the individual model are ruthlessly eliminated. When we turn from the vague and empty generalisations of David, Regnault, Gérard and Girodet, and look at the narrow forehead, the pugnacious upper lip, the prominent cheek-bones, the deep-sunk eye and the bushy eyebrows of Ingres’ figure, we may begin to understand that the gulf which yawns between the two kinds of Idealism--the abstract idealism of the Davidian school and the concrete idealism of Ingres--is quite as wide and impassable as that which separates them both from Romanticism and Naturalism.

The “Œdipus” was followed, in 1808, by the “Seated Bather” (now in the Louvre); in 1811, by “Jupiter and Thétis” (now at the Museum of Aix), a curiously Flaxman-like design; in 1812, by the “Dream of Ossian” (now at Montauban); and in 1814, by a scene of real life, “The Pope officiating among the Cardinals in the Sistine Chapel” (now in the Louvre). In this marvellous picture the artist has for once avoided the painful task of invention which he habitually imposed upon himself. He abandoned himself completely to the imperious suggestion of what was actually before his eyes. The truth, life, and richness of colour and tone of this little picture have led some of his recent admirers to speak of it as the most complete and perfectly balanced of all the artist’s works.

The “Grande Odalisque,” exhibited at the Salon of 1819, but painted in 1814, brought to a close for the time the admirable series of nude female figures which the artist had begun during his first years in Rome. His wonderful sketches of the “Venus Anadyomene” and the “Source” had already been painted, but the canvases remained unfinished in his studio, the first till 1848, the second till 1858.

His love of female beauty reveals itself again in the principal figure of the picture he sent to the Salon in 1819. This was the “Roger delivering Angelica,” a scene borrowed from the tenth song of Ariosto’s “Roland Furieux.” The picture is now in the Louvre. The young knight, mounted on a hippogriff, pierces with his lance a marine monster who was about to devour the beautiful young woman who is chained to the rocks. The figure of the young knight, his curious steed, and the strange monster which is being killed, provoked the anger and ridicule of the Academic party. In its quaint details the influence of Perugino and of the earlier Florentine and Tuscan painters was clearly noticeable. This was one of the first signs in nineteenth-century art of the Gothic revival and of that stream of tendency which came afterwards to be described as pre-Raphaelitism. The epithet “Gothic” was freely used as a term of reproach against Ingres’ picture. But the lovely figure of Angelica was a distinct creation of the painter’s own genius.

In the “Francesca da Rimini” of the same year (now in the Museum of Angers) the same pre-Raphaelite tendencies are even more strongly pronounced. The figures of the two lovers might easily have been designed by Rossetti or Madox Brown.

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All these works in which the master’s genius had approved itself with so much originality and fire had left their author to vegetate in poverty and obscurity, while the mediocrities around him had risen rapidly towards fortune and celebrity. Ingres was now anxious to return to Paris, but his meagre resources would not allow it. Then, tired of his hardships, and feeling that the social atmosphere of Rome was not favourable to him, he rejoined his friend Bartolini at Florence, hoping thus, among new surroundings, to re-establish his compromised career. His hopes were falsified. The four years passed in Florence (1820-1824) brought him only a fresh supply of hardships and mortifications. Less hospitable than Rome, Florence brought him only two commissions for portraits, those of M. and Mme. Leblanc (1823-1824); but it was here that he met M. de Pastoret, who was instrumental in getting him the commission which brought the artist his first striking and definitive success. M. de Pastoret was so pleased with Ingres’ “Entry of Charles V. into Paris” (painted in 1821) that he obtained for him a commission from the Minister of the Interior for a large picture of “The Vow of Louis XIII.” for the Cathedral of Montauban. This was begun in Florence in 1821 and finished in 1824, in which year it figured in the Salon of Paris. It was one of his pictures with which Ingres was most satisfied. It is also one of the first in which the influence of Raphael, which was to play such a large part in all his future work, is conspicuous. In a letter written in 1821, Ingres said that he was sparing no pains to make the picture “Raphaelesque and his own.” There is really more of Raphael in it than Ingres. The general arrangement of the design reminds one at once of Raphael’s “Transfiguration,” “The Sistine Madonna,” and the “Mass of Bolsena.” The figure of the Madonna is a sort of amalgam of Raphael’s various Madonnas. There is also an evident want of faith and religious enthusiasm in the picture. It marked the subjection of the artist to the Academical party which he had fought till then with so much violence and bitterness. The public which had frowned upon his vigorously personal and original works hailed this able imitation with enthusiasm. The master’s period of probation was at an end, and he returned in triumph to Paris to become the leader of the Academic party against the rising tide of Romanticism.

Ingres’ life was henceforward free from the material cares which had hampered his early career. The Parisians declared that such a picture as the “Vow of Louis XIII.” was too good to be buried in the provinces. The State wanted to retain it for Notre Dame or Val-de-Grace, and offered the artist a much larger sum of money for it than had been agreed upon. But Ingres refused these flattering offers. He was determined that Montauban should have it as an offering of his filial affection. The picture was taken there from Paris. The artist was entertained at a banquet given by the Municipality. Flattering speeches were made, and the artist departed with the cheers of his admirers ringing in his ears. And then the Archbishop, objecting to the nakedness of the infant Jesus and the two amorini holding the tablet, refused to permit the picture to be brought into the Cathedral. The artist’s friends were indignant; Ingres himself was furious. But prayers and threats could not move the Archbishop. It was only when large gilt fig-leaves had been placed to cover up the innocent nakedness of the charming little figures that he would allow the canvas to be hung in his church.

In 1824 Ingres was nominated Chevalier of the Legion of Honour. In 1825 he was elected to the Institute. Charles X. commissioned him to paint his portrait in the royal robes, and to decorate one of the ceilings of the Louvre. At the end of 1829 he was made professor at the École des Beaux-arts.

“The Apotheosis of Homer,” the subject chosen for the Louvre ceiling, was begun and finished within the short space of a single year. 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; to celebrate the real immortality of genius by showing the incessant action which it exerts on all the individuals who are successively born and developed by its influence. 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.

In no part of the pictures are Ingres’ marvellous powers of realisation more clearly displayed than in the three purely symbolical figures of the Winged Victory who places the crown of gold upon the forehead of the poet, and those representing the _Odyssey_ and the _Iliad_ who sit at his feet. What a distance separates these figures, full of feminine charm and of exuberant life, from the cold allegories of the other painters of his time! Look at the queenly grace of the Victory; the disdainful lips, the contracted nostrils of the proud woman, with hands nervously crossed upon her knee, who sits on the poet’s right; and the dreamer who sits on his left, with her mantle wrapped round her, her hand upon her chin, her half-closed eyes dreaming of the far-away adventures of Ulysses.

This picture remained in the place for which it was destined for about twenty years. Then it was replaced by an excellent copy made by three of the master’s pupils, Dumas and the brothers Baize, and the original was hung in the Louvre, where it could be better seen and admired by the public and more carefully studied by the painters.

Such a display of his powers disarmed even the many enemies which Ingres had made. But the artist was never satisfied. He thought he had not attained the supreme and definitive expression of his genius. He thought he could do better, that he could express himself with more force, more persuasive energy and warmth, in his next work. This was a religious scene commissioned for the Cathedral of Autun--the “Martyrdom of St. Symphorian.”

Before this work was finished he painted yet another of those superb portraits which he himself professed to regard as a waste of time, but which posterity values more highly than the allegorical and religious subjects to which he devoted himself with such fierce energy and consuming ardour. This was the portrait of “Bertin ainé,” which was exhibited at the Salon of 1833, and is now in the Louvre. The old man, with turbulent grey hair, with keen penetrating eyes, with wary mouth, seated so squarely in his chair with his hands on his knees--the whole bodily and spiritual presence of the man is placed so vividly upon the canvas that we seem to know him more intimately than we know our friends.

After being repainted several times, the “Martyrdom of St Symphorian” was exhibited at the Salon the year after the portrait of M. Bertin had appeared there. Instead of bringing Ingres a more complete victory than his “Homer,” it brought him an unexpected check. To us, living as we do 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 did not understand that the artist had deliberately intended to force the contrast between the bestiality of the murderers and the moral superiority of their victim.

In spite of its want of atmosphere and other shortcomings, the picture is a moving and impressive one. There is nothing vulgar in those too robust figures. The face of the young martyr, illuminated with faith, and the fanatical exaltation of the mother, form the two moral centres of the drama. Between them the curiosity and emotion of the crowd are divided. Some gaze in stupor at this woman who sends her son to torture. They do not understand that she sees him already in glory, crowned with celestial beatitudes. 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. Their sentiments oscillate between hostility, compassion, indifference, and horror. The women are grieved. An old man takes his head in his hands, confounded by such inconceivable folly. And, dominating them all, the centurion on horseback gives the order to march to the place of execution.

The learned construction of such a crowded scene, the nobility and expressiveness of the figures, the fine treatment of drapery, the virile energy of the drawing, the sober and restrained colouring, and, above all, that indefinable beauty which genius stamps on all its creations, might well have silenced the adverse criticisms with which the artists and the public assailed this picture.

Ingres suffered from these criticisms to a quite unreasonable extent. “I do not belong to this apostate century,” he exclaimed. He could not understand people’s objections, nothing could console him, and he cursed his epoch and the injustice of the public. He swore he would never exhibit at the Salon again. He wished to flee from Paris. He accepted as a deliverance the appointment of Director of the Academy of France in Rome, shut his studio, dismissed his pupils, and with an indignant and bitter spirit he quitted Paris again for the Eternal City.

But if Ingres doubted of human justice, he never doubted about his art. He devoted himself to it with renewed passion and enthusiasm. “The day I quitted Paris,” he wrote to one of his friends, “I broke for ever with everything that has to do with the public. Henceforth I will paint entirely for myself. I belong at last to myself, and I will belong only to myself.”

But, as a fact, neither Ingres’ influence nor prestige suffered from the want of success of his “St. Symphorian.” As director of the French Academy at Rome he remained the guide, counsellor, and example of all the young talents of his time. His proud ideal could not fail to attract the enthusiasm of his younger contemporaries. His teaching and example were helpful to others besides the painters. What was essential in his doctrines was applicable to all the arts: to music, which moved him so profoundly; and to sculpture--for did he not use his pencil and brush like a chisel?

Official favour also followed him in his angry retreat. The Duke of Orleans ordered a small historical picture from him, which gave him an immense deal of trouble but was at the same time a source of glorious compensation. He produced “Stratonice,” one of the most successful of his works.

The tragedy of which Stratonice was the heroine had haunted his imagination for years. He had meditated long on the subject, but had always conceived the picture on a large scale. Unfortunately, the picture had to be the same size as Paul Delaroche’s “Death of the Duke of Guise,” to which it was to serve as pendant, and Ingres was constrained to transform his grandiose conception into a miniature. Ingres took six years to paint what he called his “grand historical miniature.” And it is to be somewhat regretted that in his anxiety for archæological exactitude he invited the collaboration of the architect Hittorf. Hittorf was full of his rather excessive theories about the polychromatic architecture of the ancients. He imposed his ideas so completely on the unfortunate artist that he was permitted to paint the background of the picture. Hence the debauch of local colour, of coloured mosaics and bronzes, which threatens almost to swamp the figures. And what is worse, later archæologists have not failed to discover flaws in the pedantic architect’s too insistent details--strange anachronisms like that of placing well-known Pompeiian frescoes on the walls of the palace of Antiochus, together with motives borrowed from Greek vases at least four hundred years earlier in date. The example of this picture has had an important effect on the French school.

But in spite of these defects, the picture imposes itself on the imagination. 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 physician called in by his despairing father stands beside him and examines him. The father himself, overcome with grief, bows his head over his son’s couch. 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 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. “Stratonice” was exhibited by the Duke of Orleans in one of the galleries of the Pavilion of Marsan, and the public were freely admitted to see it. All the visitors were enchanted with it. The dramatic character of the subject was not displeasing to the Parisian public, and the artists admired the delicate taste, the pathetic grace, and the impeccable style of the workmanship. Above all, the charm of the _svelte_ and supple figure of the heroine, her head bowed under the weight of her culpable beauty, touched all hearts.

Another small picture, known indifferently as “The Odalisque with the Slave” or the “Small Odalisque,” was finished about the same time as the “Stratonice.” This was painted for the artist’s friend M. Marcotte, but is now in the Louvre. In the “Odalisque” as in the “Stratonice” we find a profusion of the details dear to Hittorf, but the figure of the beautiful Circassian curled up on the rich carpet of the harem is a masterpiece of plastic form. In this lovely body the artist has symbolised something of that perverse melancholy, that dangerous voluptuousness, which has found such moving expression in some of Baudelaire’s poems.

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In the spring of 1841 Ingres returned to Paris. He found his reputation increased by the success of the “Stratonice.” His brother artists hailed him as their leader. A banquet was offered to him by all the artists present in the capital, painters, sculptors, and architects, the only prominent absentee being Eugène Delacroix, the leader of the Romantics. Delacroix did not wish to participate in the triumph of his rival, and this triumph, so unanimously accorded, only served to widen the breach between the two masters. Henceforth the struggle between them became more bitter. 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 Ingres painted, with the exception of a small monochrome medallion of the Prince Jéròme Napoléon, which he executed in 1855. But, on the other hand, he became the favourite painter of the exalted dames of the Monarchy of July and of the Second Empire, though very much against his will, for he regarded portrait-painting as a waste of time, and wished to devote himself entirely to his grand historical and religious compositions. Nevertheless, he painted some fine portraits of beautiful women--Madame d’Haussonville in 1845, Madame Frédéric Reisat in 1846, Madame James de Rothschild in 1848, Madame Gonse and Madame Moitessier in 1852, the Princess de Broglie in 1853, a second half-length portrait (the first was a full-length) of Madame Moitessier in 1856, and finally, in 1859, that of his second wife.