INGRES.* To the question, who takes the first rank among
the French artists -of this century, a Frenchman will answer, with a slight touch of thesitation, "Ingres." But if you vary the form, and inquire the relative reputation of such men as Delaroche or Ary Scheffer, 'both so well known and loved in England, he will laugh at the -thought of the comparison. If he hesitates at the name of Ingres, it is not, we imagine, from a doubt of the verdict which he desires -to give, but because the ugliness in which the great artist seemed somewhat to delight causes a slight grudge in the frank admission -of his merits.
In the Gallery of the Luxemburg the visitor will find some -eight pictures bearing the signature of Ingrei, three of which are portraits of ugliness unsurpassed by any pictorial creations we re-
Ingres : so Vie, ses Travaux, so Dec/rise. Par le Vicomte Henri Delaborde. Paris: Henri Pion
member to have seen, unless the palm be ascribed to certain early works of our own Pre-Raphaelites. These date from Ingres' Roman years, when, in the beginning of this century, he delighted to send home works at which indignant critics howled aloud, while yet compelled by their power to bestow upon them a measure of attention. Side by side with these portraits is a divinely beautiful Perseus, and a replica of the world-famous fresco of Homer. A small copy of "La Source" makes us well understand its claim to admiration for the purity of the painting, as also for those attributes reproduced in the widely popular engravings. A bright, striking head of Talma is hung between "La Source" and a small Venus rising from the sea. What more lovely than this Venus? What more frightful little Loves were ever born of ocean foam ? One looks at them aghast, and the unlearned spectator asks himself with what motive the great Ingres had selected those ugly babies, since of lovely opea there is certainly no lack of choice. In fact, he seems to have started nearly seventy years ago with the same general theory as that which has inspired Millais and Holman Hunt ; like them to have compelled attention and wrung forth admiration, like them to have been capable of realizing the highest conceptions of beauty, and like them to have been haunted by discords causing them to utter ever and anon a pictorial shriek.
Ingres came from the South of France. He was born at Mon- tauban in the year 1780. His father was a local artist and artizan ; one of a class of men once widely diffused through Europe ; who dwelt all their days in the towns where they were born, and there wrought with hand and brain. This one was sculptor, musician, painter, architect, all in one. He modelled sphinxes and figures for the gardens of the old regime; he arranged the decorations for religions fetes, painted scenes for the theatre, and portraits in miniature ; and played the violin at concerts. It was to the exercise of the latter art that he educated his young son ; the famous Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres began his career as a violinist in the theatre of Toulouse while yet a mere child. But it happened that he one day saw a copy of Raffaelle's " Vierge a la Chaise," the round Florentine picture so familiar to us, and from that time he was seized with an ardent desire to be a painter, and to get to Paris, and to become a pupil of David's, whose fame then filled all France ; and after a time spent in drawing with local artists (more parti- cularly with Briant, a landscape painter, who, in 1793, saved from the vandal revolutionists the works of art now preserved in the museum of Toulouse), young Ingres was allowed to set out for Paris, where he arrived in the end of 1796, and was admitted into David's studio. In five years he carried off the great prize ; what is called in France, "Le prix de Rome." But in those years of torment, the State, as now, alas ! was very short of funds, and there was no money for sending promising young students to Rome. Bonaparte signed an order for Ingres and two others, who had taken prizes for sculpture and architecture, to remain tempo- rarily in France, and a studio was allotted to Ingres in the old Convent of the Capucines, which stood on the site of the present Rue de la Pais. The convent was then a nest of artists, some twenty of them, many of them already known to fame, having rooms therein. It was not till 1806 that Ingres went to Rome ; and began sending home from thence works which were the aggra- vation of the critics for nearly twenty years. The cold classicism of David was then the ideal of the art-loving public ; both by his virtues and his sins as an artist, Ingres was a hard nut for it to crack. His Odalisque, painted in 1814, and exhibited in the Salon of 1819, was bought (before it was exhibited) for 800 francs by M. le Comte Pourtales. It was received with raillery and re- proach in Paris, and was thought of no more till in 1826 a litho- graph made it popular. That same picture was re-exhibited in the great collection of 1855, when so many hidden treasures saw the light. It has lately changed hands at sixty times its original price !
It may be imagined that during these years of struggle Ingres was very poor. He had married in 1813 a good woman who faithfully upheld him through them, and who even persuaded him not to accept an offer made by a rich Englishman of taking him to England, and selling for two years his time and his brush to the painting of portraits. She thought this step would be a descent, and preferred to struggle on with him in Rome and Florence, where, to use artist parlance, he executed innumerable little " pot- boilers " in the shape of portraits which were paid under £2 each.
Ingres, late in life, reckoned up 300 such, dating from the first year of his stay in Rome ; and said he had made by them, big and little, certainly not more than 8,000f., £320. In these years Madame Ingres cooked the dinner and made his coats herself. Fortunately for her, in these sad and sometimes hungry years, she had no children.
It was in 1824 that the tide turned at last. The French Go- vernment is accustomed to order pictures far more freely than our own, and frequently purchases works exhibited in Paris, and pre- sents them to the provincial museums and galleries which exist in nearly every town of any note in France ; and after the removal of Ingres to Florence, a good friend and man of influence, the Comte Amedee de Pastoret, procured him a Government commis- sion for a semi-religious semi-historical picture, destined for the Cathedral of Montauban, his native town. The price offered was three thousand francs, £120; but so great was the effect made by this work when exhibited in the Salon of 1824 that Government doubled the sum. Henceforth Ingres was poor no longer.
From this time until the close of a life prolonged far beyond the average years of humanity Ingres never ceased producing. He lived until the 14th of January, 1867. In 1865 he was finishing a large drawing containing eighty-one figures, and entitled " Homer° Deifie," a reproduction with additions of one of his most famous works, executed by command of Charles X. for a ceiling in the Louvre, namely, the Apotheosis of Homer. In 1849 Ingres lost the faithful wife who had strengthened him during his long years of struggle, but who had then enjoyed his fame for more than thirty years. Later he remarried, and his second wife sur- vives. He had no children, and he had the great grief to lose the one favourite pupil who was to him as a son,—Hippolyte Flandrin.
His works, incontestable in their greatness, have been, as we observed in our opening words, the occasion of hot disputes whose echo still lingers. It is not many months since Madame Sand, in a feuilleton of the Temps newspaper, detailed a long conversation she had had with Delacroix on the occasion of the exhibition of the Stratonice. This picture, which now belongs to the Due d'Aumale, who purchased it at the cost of nearly £4,000, a sum which proves that it possesses qualities approving it to one set of French connois- seurs, was right royally abused both by the artist and by the prose poet. One said it was made up of little lozenges of colour nicely plastered, and one said that Antiochus, the hero of the picture, was not really ill, but was writhing in agony because Ingres had glued him to the bed! And then Delaeroix went off into a lecture upon the science of reflected colour, which Madame Sand oddly enough reproduces at length, as if it were not familiar to anybody who ever held a brush in his hands. Ingres himself, who worried over the picture for five mortal years, and who called it "my great historical miniature," was so enchanted at its great success (in 1840) that he wrote to his friend Gatteaux "My good wife and I are as happy as children," and added, "I don't know whether I am awake or asleep." Ingres is reproached by the opposite school as being a painter of "ideas," and not an artist proper, and is seized upon as an example in the curious quarrel which has raged in the theoretical country of France about the true domain of art. The critic Taine, for in- stance, speaking of Mulready's subject-pictures, says that they contain a wonderful sum of accurate observation, only " what a mistake that they were not written, instead of painted !"—as if the rendering of a thought were foreign to the domain of art.
Let us thank Heaven that the practical instincts of human nature will always secure to us artists and poets of both sorts, Raphaels, as well as Rembrandts and Kaulbach, in addition to Etty and Velazquez. The world is wide ; Rossetti and De Musset are inspired poets, but &ranger and Longfellow have a trick of being read ! Beethoven is a bottomless abyss of music, but there will always be people who prefer Handel and even Dr. Arne! Ingres spent exactly seventy years in translating pure and lofty ideas to his countrymen by means of lines and colours which have reached the hearts of thousands in all parts of France. All his critics and objectors were far from being what he politely calls "mediocres aboyeurs ;" but we may safely say that no man ever achieves such a permanent result, unless he be endowed with powers which scatter theories to the winds.
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