French painter

After the royal Academy of Toulouse, Ingres enters in 1798 to the workshop of David, who makes him discover the traditional antique and works. But very quickly the young artist moves away from his Master, and works out a kind of humanism based on the glorification of the heroes and the gods (Oedipus and the Sphinx, Jupiter and Thétis). He obtains the first Grand Prix of Rome with the Ambassadors of Agamemnon (1801), and remains with the Médicis villa. In 1803, it receives an ordering of Bonaparte, then First consul. It also receives that of a middle-class rich person, Rivière, of which it carries out the portrait (accompanied by its wife and of its daughter), like that of his daughter (Portrait of Miss Rivière, 1805). Brushed with speed, its painted portraits - it made some also more than 1' 200 with the pencil - are wonders of technique and expression of which most famous, after 1810, are those of Mrs. de Senonnes, the count Gouriev and Mrs. Marcotte of Sainte-Marie.

Of return to Paris, he is a great success with the Living room of 1824, with his historical composition the Wish of Louis XIII (cathedral of Montauban). During the ten years which follow, remarkable teacher, it forms a whole generation of painters, of which Theodore Chassériau. In 1834, the Martyrdom of Symphorien saint is very badly accommodated, and Ingres sets out again in Rome - as directing of the Médicis villa - until his triumphal return in 1841.

The series of large naked, where it can be devoted freely to its taste for the arabesque, begins in 1803 with the Bather known as of Valpinçon. Several other masterpieces, mainly Large the Odalisque (1814), the Source (1856), the Turkish bath (1863), are related to these exercises of style and remain the most modern part of its work.

Ingres wanted to be “painter of history”, but paradoxically the great compositions on which he thought of establishing his glory became null and void. It is thus by its portraits and its tables the naked ones that it reached with the celebrity and was made a place well with him enters the neoclassicism and the romanticism. Its technique deviates from that of David; for him, indeed, the drawing cannot be only one contour, but a generating line of the form and movement. Its manner remains that of visual which proceeds meticulously to the inventory of the forms, where often the exactitude of a detail harms the harmony of the unit. It feels at ease only in the fixed attitudes and the slow gestures. However its “cut out” style develops a poetic universe which will be precisely reproached to him by the defenders of the neoclassicism. Its art complexes (more difficult to seize than that of its Delacroix rival) was badly understood of alive sound. But there is not a doubt that he played a considerable part in the development of modern painting: Seurat, the Cubists, Matisse, the surrealist ones, and even Picasso, recognized their debt towards him.