Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres
Master of line.
Ingres was David's pupil and defended drawing against the colour of the Romantics. His harem women have backs that are too long but a perfect line.
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres was born in 1780 in Montauban in southern France. His father was a decorative artist and musician who taught his son both drawing and the violin. As a teenager Ingres played the violin in an orchestra in Toulouse while studying at the academy there. In 1797 he came to Paris and became a pupil of Jacques-Louis David. He won the Prix de Rome in 1801, but because of the state's poor finances he could not travel until 1806.
That same year he exhibited Napoleon I on His Imperial Throne, now in the Musée de l'Armée in Paris. The critics found it stiff and old-fashioned. Ingres was deeply hurt and stayed in Italy for eighteen years, in Rome and Florence. Among other things he made a living drawing pencil portraits of tourists, and these drawings are now counted among his finest works. In 1813 he married Madeleine Chapelle. Real recognition came only in 1824, when he exhibited The Vow of Louis XIII in Paris.
Ingres was a master of line. He held that drawing was the foundation of art and that colour was secondary. His surfaces are smooth, the brushwork almost invisible, and the contours clean and flowing. To achieve a more beautiful line he readily distorted anatomy. The Grande Odalisque (1814) in the Louvre has a back that critics said had a few vertebrae too many. Other well-known works are The Valpinçon Bather (1808) and the circular Turkish Bath (1862), both in the Louvre, and the portrait of Madame Moitessier in the National Gallery in London.
Ingres became the leader of the academic tradition and the rival of Eugène Delacroix, who stood for the colour and movement of Romanticism. The conflict between them was described as a battle between line and colour. From 1835 to 1841 Ingres was director of the French Academy in Rome. He died in Paris in 1867. His violin playing gave rise to the French expression “violon d'Ingres”, meaning a hobby.
Ingres influenced both academic painters and modern artists. Degas was a great admirer, and Picasso and Matisse were struck by his free treatment of the body's form. A museum in Montauban is devoted to him.