Jean Auguste-Dominique Ingres
Place Born
MontaubanPlace Died
ParisBio
Ingres, like his fellow students in J. -L. Davids studio, began his career as a painter of classical history. In 1801 he won the coveted Prix de Rome with a subject from the Iliad. Ingres interest in reconstructing the past was not, however, limited to this type of heroic Greco-Roman subject matter that had been accorded the highest academic prestige since the late eighteenth century. Early in the 1810s Ingres initiated what was to become an equally significant aspect of his history painting the depiction of modern (i.e., post-classical) subjects. In pursuing this direction Ingres aligned himself with a small group of Davidian students who have been called the Troubadour painters. Like them Ingres blurred the distinction between history and genre painting by selecting subjects of an anecdotal rather than heroic nature.
The stylistic approach used by Ingres and the troubadour painters combined the reductive impulses of neoclassicism with a taste for high finish and detail. Ingres, however, surpassed his colleagues both in the range of his subject matter and in the stylistic eclecticism he employed. He found pictorial inspiration not only in the venerated High Renaissance masters, such as Raphael, but also in Medieval and Early Renaissance pictures that were still considered strange and gothic by his contemporaries.
Ingres earliest modern subject picture, dating from 1813, was Raphael and the Fornarina. Following within a decade he painted Dantes doomed lovers Paolo and Francesca, Ariostos Roger and Angelica and scenes from the lives of Aretino, Leonardo de Vinci, and Kings Henri IV, Charles V and Philip V of Spain. From this repertory of themes Ingres created many versions throughout his long career. By the mid-nineteenth century and the height of the Romantic movement, these modern history subjects, pioneered by Ingres and a few other artists, inspired a large number of artists and constituted a significant proportion of the pictures exhibited in the annual Salons.