In Your Face - Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres exhibit, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, New York

National Review, Nov 8, 1999 by James Gardner

For the 75-year-old Ingres, the Exposition Universelle of 1855 represented nothing less than the crowning achievement of a lifetime in art. Sixty-nine of his paintings were gathered together in a full-dress retrospective of a sort that, though scarcely a third the size of the superb exhibit now at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, was almost unheard-of at the time. And how did Ingres respond to this most personal triumph? He fled Paris at once, ducking for cover in a country house at Meung-sur-Loire. He foresaw all too well the critical onslaught that awaited him. Baudelaire likened his works to "a population of automatons that disturbs our senses by its all too visible and palpable strangeness." For Paul Mantz, the galleries were as inviting as a hospital ward "for lymphatic or bilious patients." Most cutting of all, the Goncourt brothers compared Ingres's life's work unfavorably to the portraits of Cogniet, of whom, even then, no one had ever heard!

Though possibly the greatest of French painters, praised by some as the very God of Drawing, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres suffered such attacks without respite for almost seven decades, from the time he left Toulouse as a young man to enter the studio of Jacques-Louis David, until the day of his death at 86. Almost half his career was spent in Florence and Rome, where he found relative peace amid cantankerous obscurity. "I want to break with my century," he once wrote. "That is how ignorant, stupid, and brutal I find it."

But if Ingres came to be known as an embittered curmudgeon, that was hardly the whole story. He was one of those people whose body and face are fundamentally at odds with the person inside. Hunched over and grayly brooding, Ingres looked every bit like a Sumatran rhino beset on all sides by the mincing picadors of the Parisian art press. Yet underneath that hide-and a very thin hide it was-were deep and unanticipated reservoirs of sweetness. Twice he married women who, in the otherwise sober words of the exhibition's catalogue, were "destined to make Ingres the most contented husband imaginable." Then, when he became head of the French Academy in Rome, a veritable genius for pedagogy turned him into a devoted father figure to an entire generation of French artists. Even when he encountered his arch-nemesis, Delacroix-"the Apostle of Ugliness," as Ingres called him-the latter had to admit that he found Ingres to be "very cordial and very courteous."

What Delacroix most disparaged in his older rival was that he seemed to have "no imagination at all." What Delacroix meant, if we read between the lines, is that Ingres lacked the literary instinct that Delacroix excelled in, which saw painting as an extension of the narrative art of Dante, Goethe, and Byron. In one sense, the claim is not entirely unwarranted. Today Ingres is known chiefly as a portraitist. But like Gainsborough before him and Sargent after, he disparaged this lucrative career, imagining he was meant for loftier things, namely history painting, whose preeminence in art theory had remained unchallenged since the Cinquecento. Thus he poured his heart, but not his genius, into grand historical canvases like The Martyrdom of Saint Symphorean (1834) or The Entry into Paris of the Dauphin (1821). These works are marred by the absence of the one thing that Delacroix, so deficient in other respects, understood implicitly: If a history painting is to work, its myriad parts must be linked by a single vertebral column of passion, whether that passion is fiery or cold as ice. And yet, even in these paintings, Ingres refuses to abandon his habitually dogged observation of surface or to subordinate the manifold parts into a single and harmonious whole.

Of course, nothing from Ingres's hand is ever wholly bad, and some of these works, like The Vow of Louis XIII (1824) and Odalisque with Slave (1839), are masterpieces of sorts. But his real genius was reserved for portraiture, and thus it is fitting that the exhibition should be devoted to this only. It is here that we see the full evidence of Ingres's prodigious imagination, even though it was not what the artists of his time understood by the imagination. A modernist avant la lettre, Ingres was able in practice, if not in theory, to see beyond the mimetic vanity of portraiture to a unified work of art. Only an artist of the rarest visual imagination could have pulled off these thousand felicities of color and form-the gold chain looping like a glowworm against the nocturnal blackness of Jacques-Louis Blanc's vest, the energetic intrusion into the foreground of Madame de Senonnes's crimson sleeve, the abrupt, upward thrust of a canary-colored collar against the gray, Pontormoesque face of Marcotte d'Argen- teuil, the olive tint of Granet's features as they rhyme with the clouds that lower over the Quirinale in the background. Except or its impassioned use of paint, all of 20th-century abstraction can be seen in statu nascendi in the harmonies of Ingres's portraiture.