Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Odalisque
and Slave, 1839. Graphite, black and white chalk, gray and brown wash.
Signed, inscribed, and dated at lower left, J. Ingres / Rom. 1839. Thaw
Collection, The Morgan Library & Museum. Photo: Graham Haber, 2011. "Click on" to enlarge.
NEW YORK, N.Y.-
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres
(1780–1867) is among an elite group of nineteenth-century French masters whose
style is almost instantly recognizable. Arguably the greatest portraitist of his
time, Ingres was a brilliant draftsman, and his drawings have long been prized
along with his paintings. The
Morgan Library & Museum presents sixteen superb drawings and three
letters by Ingres from its collection, together with one exceptional loan, in a
focused exhibition in the Clare Eddy Thaw Gallery. Running through November 27
the show spans Ingres’s career and provides visitors with an intimate look at a
draftsman who is indisputably one of the greatest in French history.
Ingres’s Neoclassicism has often been framed in opposition
to the Romanticism of Eugène Delacroix and Théodore Géricault, as well as other
artists associated with France’s Revolutionary Era. This view tends to obscure
a freshness and originality that Ingres shared with his contemporaries. Happily
for visitors to the Morgan, the Ingres exhibition will run concurrently with
David, Delacroix, and Revolutionary France:
Drawings from the Louvre, which
features a further ten sheets by the artist among the more than seventy
drawings from the Louvre chronicling the period book-ended by the Revolution of
1789 and the establishment of the Second Empire in 1852—largely encompassing
the years of Ingres’s career.
"The Morgan is delighted to present this exceptional
group of drawings by an artist whose influence was widespread in his day and
continued into the twentieth century,” said William M. Griswold director of The
Morgan Library & Museum. “Ingres was famous for his devotion to a classical
style, yet a number of modern artists, such as Matisse and Picasso, were
profoundly indebted to him. We are especially pleased to present this
exhibition in the context of the larger show of drawings from the Louvre,
allowing visitors to see Ingres in the broad sweep of his time.”
The show will chronicle the major phases of the artist’s
career, beginning with Portrait of a Boy of ca. 1793–4, which he executed when he
was a thirteen or fourteen-year-old student at the Académie Royale in Toulouse.
When Ingres entered the Paris studio of Jacques-Louis David in 1797, he
abandoned the fine modeling of graphite and sensitivity to minute detail that
characterize this early drawing. Also on view is a preparatory drawing for
Oedipus and the Sphinx of 1808, which dates from the period when the artist was
a pensionnaire at the Villa Medici in Rome. Like many of his fellow foreign
artists in Rome, Ingres explored and sketched local monuments such as St.
Peter’s, the Palazzo Barberini, and Santa Maria Maggiore. An extraordinary
cityscape, View of Santa Maria Maggiore of ca. 1813–14, was likely executed in
a sketchbook that Ingres carried with him to a preferred vantage point on the
Esquiline Hill. He precisely rendered the church facade, but merely outlined
the baroque sculptures and the procession leading away from the entrance.
In the years following his studies, Ingres established an
important studio on Rome’s Via Gregoriana where he worked on imperial
commissions and painted and drew portraits of French occupation officials and
their families. Portrait of Hippolyte Devillers of 1812 features the Director
of Probate and Estates who moved to Rome the previous year and sat for Ingres
on at least three occasions. Pictured as a bachelor at the age of forty-seven,
Devillers appears somewhat nervous and delicate, as if he has not quite gained
confidence in his new office. One of the most iconic drawings to be included in
the exhibition is Ingres’s Portrait of Monsieur Guillaume Guillon Lethière of
1815, which depicts the new Director of the French Academy in Rome in all his
convivial pomposity. The delicate and naturalistic shading of Lethière’s round
face juxtaposed to the rapid and jagged lines of his collar clearly demonstrate
why Ingres is considered an unparalleled master of portraiture.
The Morgan Library & Museum is internationally renowned
for its extensive collection of literary and historical manuscripts, and the
Ingres exhibition includes not only drawings but also three revelatory letters
by the artist. In one poignant example, written to Marie-Anne-Julie Forestier,
Ingres’s fiancée, the artist laments his intense homesickness during his first
days in Rome. He writes, “I lie down from nine at night until six in the
morning, I do not sleep, I roll around in my bed, I cry, I think continuously
of you . . .” Nine months later, Ingres would break his engagement, blaming his
unwillingness to return to Paris after the negative reviews his paintings had
received at the Salon.
Ingres once told a pupil that if he placed a sign above his
studio door, it would read Ecole de Dessin (School of Drawing). The centerpiece
of the exhibition is the large-scale graphite and black chalk Odalisque and
Slave of 1839, which likely served as the model for the engraved version of the
subject. The epitome of exoticism and orientalism, this exquisite drawing is
emblematic of the erotic tales of Arabia that had captured the imagination of
nineteenth-century Paris.
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Portrait of Guillaume
Guillon Lethière (1760-1832), 1815. Graphite. Inscribed at lower right,
M. de Ingres / a Madlle Lescot. Bequest of Therese Kuhn Straus in memory
of her husband, Herbert N. Straus. Photo: Graham Haber, 2011
No comments:
Post a Comment