Art Gallery

Ingres, Jean-Auguste-Dominique (1780 - 1867), Ingres' father, a sculptor and decorative plasterer, instructed his son in drawing and sent him to Toulouse Academy in 1791. In 1797 he became a pupil of David and in 1799 he was accepted by the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. In 1801 he won the Grand Prix de Rome with "The Envoys of Agamemnon" (Paris, Musée de l'Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beau-Arts). In 1806 he introduced himself as a portraitist at the Salon but received muchcriticism for his works, among them his great portraits of the Rivière family. During the same year he went on an Academy scholarship to Rome, where he stayed until 1819, producing his much admired portrait drawings of French society. Here he studied Antiquity and the works of Raphael, Holbein and Titiaan and became greatly influenced by Masaccio's work when he came to Florence in 1819. He developed his own style, independent of his master David,as his early work, the "Valpinçon Bather" from 1808, shows.

He returned to Paris in 1824 and began to teach. In 1825 he received the Order of the Legion of Honour from King Charles X and was elected a member of the Academy. His "Apotheosis of Homer" (Paris, Louvre, 1827), which seems to embody Ingres' own artistic and literary beliefs, is characteristic of his classicism based on the study of Raphael. His precisely drawn and painted portraits show more freedom than his other works in their life-like perception. He was also a master draughtsman, perhaps the most important of the 19th century, leaving 4000 sketches and drawings to his home town of Montauban. The Salon's disapproving attitude to his "Martyrdom of the Symphorian", 1834, (Autun Cathedral), caused him to accept the directorship of the French Academy in Rome from 1835 to 1841. On his return to Paris he met at last with enormous succes and received the Order of Merit in 1845. As president of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts (from 1850) he became the leader of the Classical school. At the World Exhibition 1855 he was represented by 48 of his works. In opposition to the Delacroix and other Romantics and the Realism of Courbet, Ingres upheld the Classic idealism with its clarity of line and sensuality of colouring based on a close study of nature.