Portraits By Ingres

Om portrætter af den franske maler Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres (1780-1867)

An exploration of the portrait art of Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, focusing on his studio practice and his training of students.

Ingres’ portrait drawings rank among the art’s supreme achievements, exhibiting the artist’s brilliant draftsmanship and rare ability to capture character and personal style. This splendid volume presents Ingres portraits of many affluent and distinguished men and women of his age, among them the celebrated French composer Charles Gounod. Sources include the Louvre Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Pierpont Morgan Library.

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780-1867) produced a body of work that strongly appealed to his contemporaries while disconcerting them. Even today, the odd qualities of his work continue to fascinate scholars, critics, and artists. In this handsomely illustrated and elegantly written book, Susan L. Siegfried argues that the strangeness associated with Ingres's paintings needs to be located in the complex and richly invested nature of the work itself, as well as in the artist's very powerful--if often perverse--sense of artistic project. She shows that his major re-thinking of pictorial narrative - in his classical literary, historical, and religious subjects - was as central to his achievement as his distinctive rendering of the female figure in classical nudes and portraits. He was engaged in a complex process of giving visual form to narrative, which he did in new and unusual ways that involved him in a close reading of the texts on which he drew, including authors such as Homer, Virgil, Ariosto, and Dante, as well as religious narratives and stories about medieval and early modern French history.

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780 - 1867) was a French Neoclassical painter. Although he considered himself to be a painter of history in the tradition of Nicolas Poussin and Jacques-Louis David, it is Ingres's portraits, both painted and drawn, that are recognized as his greatest legacy.Ingres was profoundly influenced by past artistic traditions, and aspired to become the guardian of academic orthodoxy against the ascendant Romantic style, exemplified by Eugene Delacroix. His expressive distortions of form and space made him an important precursor of modern art, influencing Picasso, Matisse and other modernists.He was finally recognized at the Salon in 1824, when his Raphaelesque painting of the Vow of Louis XIII was met with acclaim, and Ingres was acknowledged as the leader of the Neoclassical school in France. Although the income from commissions for history paintings allowed him to paint fewer portraits, his portrait of Louis-Francois Bertin marked his next popular success in 1833. The following year, his indignation at the harsh criticism of his ambitious composition The Martyrdom of Saint Symphorian caused him to return to Italy, where he assumed directorship of the French Academy in Rome in 1835. He returned to Paris in 1841. In his later years he painted new versions of many of his earlier compositions, a series of designs for stained glass windows, several important portraits of women, and The Turkish Bath, the last of his several Orientalist paintings of the female nude, which he finished at the age of 83.

An illustrated study of famed French painter Jean-Auguste Ingres.

Masterpieces of drawing from the great schools and traditions of Italy and northern Europe, spanning four centuries from Filippino Lippi, Andrea del Sarto, and Titian to Rembrandt, Van Dyck, and Ingres. 47 plates.

Part of the 'Basic Art' series, this book looks at the life and work of Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres. It covers the cultural and historical importance of the artist, and features over 100 colour illustrations with explanatory captions.