Ingres, Jean-Auguste-Dominique (1780-1867)

Charles X, king of France, pictured in his coronation robes in 1824. This is a detail from a painting by the French neoclassical artist Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780-1867).

French painter. A leading neoclassicist, he was a student of Jacques Louis David. He studied and worked in Rome c. 1807-20, where he began the Odalisque series of sensuous female nudes, then went to Florence, and returned to France in 1824. His portraits painted in the 1840s-50s are meticulously detailed and highly polished.

A master draughtsman, he considered drawing ‘the probity of art’, and developed his style - based on the study of Raphael and marked by clarity of line and a cool formality - in fierce opposition to the Romanticism of Eugène Delacroix. His major works, which exercised a profound influence on 19th-century French Academic art, include Roger and Angelica (1819; Louvre, Paris), La Grande Baigneuse (1808; Louvre, Paris), and La Grande Odalisque (1814; Louvre, Paris), and the portraits Madame Moitessier (1856; National Gallery, London) and François Marius (1807; Musée Granet, Aix-en-Provence).

Ingres was the son of a tailor who was also an amateur painter, sculptor and musician. He became a pupil of David, won the Prix de Rome in 1801, and studied in Rome and in Florence until 1824. His long absence from Paris, repeated 1834-41 (when he was again in Rome), partly explains his lack of sympathy with French contemporaries, notably Delacroix, who had breathed the atmosphere of Romanticism. Ingres's view of what was classic in art was founded on Raphael rather than David, as seen in the Vow of Louis XIII (Montauban Cathedral), acclaimed at the Salon of 1824, and the Apotheosis of Homer (1827), commissioned by Charles X for a ceiling in the Louvre.

In subject Ingres was as various as any of his contemporaries, his works including a Romantic, moonlit Dream of Ossian (1813; Musée Ingres, Montauban), both antique and medieval themes, paintings of ceremonial functions, religious paintings, portraits, and nude compositions oriental at least in the suggestion of the title, such as La Grande Odalisque and Le Bain Turc (1863; Louvre, Paris). His quarrel with the Romantics and the nature of his own Classicism could be simply stated as a preference for drawing rather than colour. His pencil portraits, many executed during his first Italian stay, display his drawing skill. In the painted portrait, such as that of M de Norvins (National Gallery, London) or Mme de Sennones (Musée de Nantes), he produced some masterpieces, while the nude paintings of his later years have a sensuous beauty.

The Musée Ingres in Montauban, founded 1843, received the contents of his studio by bequest, including 4,000 of his drawings and numerous paintings.