Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres

French, 1780–1867

BiographyIngres was born on 29 August 1780 in Montaubon. He learned to draw primarily by copying his artist father's collection of prints reproducing old master paintings. He studied at the Toulouse academy and then entered the Paris studio of Jacques-Louis David (1748-1825) in 1797, where he worked for five years. Here Ingres formed his unique style based on a fusion of descriptive realism, linear purity, and idealized beauty.

Ingres painted many major history paintings with neoclassical and religious subjects, was the foremost defender of the French classical tradition throughout his long artistic career, and trained innumerable French artists (the ingristes) in Paris and in Rome.

While his history paintings were most highly valued by the French academy and by the artist himself, his portraiture alone would have assured him renown as an artist. His two portraits of Napoleon Bonaparte (1804; Liège, Musée des Beaux Arts and 1806; Paris, Musée de l'Armée), the several portraits of the Duc d'Orléans (first in 1841), and the portrait of the Countess d'Haussonville (1845; New York, The Frick Collection), for example, are closely observed, immaculately painted masterpieces, each richly revealing the sitter and his or her milieu. His most evocative portrait of the July Monarchy (1830-48) period is Monsieur Bertin(1832, Musée du Louvre), director of the government organ Le Journal des débats.

A skilled draftsman, Ingres also drew around five hundred portraits in pencil, beginning with profile medallions, done in the style of the engraved portraits of Charles-Nicolas Cochin (1715-1790) , and the first full-length portrait of his father in 1792. During his study with David and subsequently in Rome, he drew several portraits of his artist and architect friends. In 1815, after the withdrawal of French troops from Italy, and consequently financial support for the artist, he supported himself by drawing portraits of English tourists and Restoration officials. The drawn portraits continued to be an important aspect of his work throughout his career, although he did them for friendship and/or favor (as in the Oberlin drawing), never again for actual cash. Around fifty of his portrait drawings, done between 1798 and 1858, were first exhibited in the Salon des Arts-Unis, Paris, in 1861.

Ingres died in Paris on 14 January 1867.