Seungyong Chang: Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres

Showing posts with label Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres. Show all posts

Sunday, January 17, 2021

ARTIST OF THE WEEK: 61. Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, ACJ Art Academy

Born: 29 August 1780; Montauban, France

Died: January 14, 1867; Paris, France

Nationality: French

Art Movement: Neoclassicism, Orientalism

Field: painting, drawing

Influenced by: Nicolas Poussin, Jacques-Louis David, Raphael

Influenced on: Théodore Chassériau, Jean-Hippolyte Flandrin, Henri Lehmann, Eugène Emmanuel Amaury-Duval, Edgar Degas, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres was a French Neoclassical painter. Deeply influenced by past artistic traditions, Ingres aspired to become the guardian of academic orthodoxy against the ascendant Romantic style. Although he regarded himself as a painter of history in the tradition of Nicolas Poussin and Jacques-Louis David, it is his portraits that are recognized as his greatest legacy. Regarded as an important pioneer of modern art for his expressive distortions of form and space, he influenced Picasso, Matisse and other modernists.

Ingres, who studied in the studio of David, debuted at his Salon in 1802 and won the Prix de Rome for his painting "The Ambassadors of Agamemnon in the tent of Achilles.” By the time he left for Rome in 1806, his style, showing his close study of Italian and Flemish Renaissance masters, changed little for the rest of his life.

The Ambassadors of Agamemnon in the tent of Achilles,
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1801)

He worked in Rome and Florence from 1806 to 1824, regularly sending his paintings to the Paris Salon, but was criticized by critics who evaluated his style as bizarre and archaic. In 1824, when his Raphaelesque painting, "The Vow of Louis XIII", was praised, he was finally recognized at the Salon, and again in 1833 with his “Portrait of Monsieur Bertin" reaped popular success.

The Vow of Louis XIII, Jean-Auguste-
Dominique Ingres (1824)

Portrait of Monsieur Bertin, Jean-Auguste-
Dominique Ingres (1832)

The following year, however, his ambitious work, “The Martyrdom of Saint Symphorian,” was severely criticized and it caused him to return to Italy, and then he returned to Paris in 1841 to spend the rest of his life.

The Martyrdom of Saint Symphorian,
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1834)

In his later years, he painted new versions of his early works, a series of designs for stained-glass windows, several important portraits of women, and “The Turkish Bath”, the last of his several female nude paintings showing Orientalism.

The Turkish Bath, Jean-Auguste-Dominique
Ingres (1852–59, modified in 1862)

Famous Works (Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres)

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Wednesday, December 16, 2020

Interesting Art Stories: 41. Grande Odalisque, Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, ACJ Art Academy

How are you?

On every Thursday, I am introducing the stories about various artists and their paintings with the title “Interesting Art Stories”.

The 41st story for this week is “Grande Odalisque” by Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres.

Self-Portrait, Jean-Auguste-Dominique
Ingres

“Grande Odalisque” is an oil painting by Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres in 1814 depicting an odalisque, a court lady in the household of the Ottoman sultan.

Suleiman the Magnificent,
the longest-reigning sultan of the Ottoman
Empire

Ottoman Empire

This painting was considered by Ingres' contemporaries as signifying Ingres' shift from Neoclassicism, the style he’d been identified with for much of his career, toward exotic Romanticism.

This painting was commissioned by Napoleon's sister, Queen Caroline Murat of Naples (Caroline Bonaparte).

Caroline Murat, Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun

Although the actual pose of a reclining woman looking back over her shoulder directly referred to “Portrait of Madame Récamier” by Jacques-Louis David in 1800, Ingres was inspired from the works such as “Dresden Venus (Sleeping Venus)” by Giorgione, and “Venus of Urbino” by Titian.

Portrait of Madame Récamier, Jacques-Louis David

Dresden Venus (Sleeping Venus), Giorgione

Venus of Urbino, Titian

Ingres portrays an odalisque in languid pose with distorted proportions in this painting. Her small head, elongated limbs and a combination of cool colors show the influences of Mannerists such as Parmigianino, whose “Madonna with the Long Neck” was also famous for anatomical distortion.

Madonna with the Long Neck,
Parmigianino

When it was first shown, it received wide criticism from critics due to its elongated proportions and lack of anatomical realism, and they considered Ingres as a rebel against the contemporary style of form and content.

When the painting was first exhibited in the Paris Salon of 1819, one critic criticized the work as "This painting indeed has nothing that constitutes imitation of a real female, with no bones, no muscle, no blood and no life."

Instead of ignoring such anatomical realism, Ingres used abundant, even light to soften the volume of the woman's body, and long lines to convey the woman's body curvature and sensuality.

Reclining odalisque, Gustave Léonard de Jonghe

It was estimated that the woman in this painting has two or three more vertebrae than the normal woman, and critics at that time believed that this was a simple mistake of Ingres. However, recent studies have shown that such elongations were deliberately distorted by Ingres.

The results of measuring real women’s proportions showed that the woman in the painting was drawn in a state which her body could not be replicated when referring to the curvature of the spine and rotation of the pelvis, and that her left arm was shorter than the right.

In addition, contrary to the previous claims, this study concluded that the woman in the painting was longer by five instead of two or three vertebrae, and that the excess affected the lengths of the pelvis and lower back, instead of merely the lumbar region.

Odalisque, Jules Joseph Lefebvre

There are also claims that the distance between her gaze and her pelvic area is a physical expression of the depth and complexity of the woman's thoughts and emotions.

This painting was also used for the first color poster of the feminist art group "Guerrilla Girls". The Metropolitan Museum poster, produced by this group in 1989, puts a gorilla mask on Ingres' odalisque and posed the question "Do women have to be naked to get into the Met. Museum?"