Ingres
Madrid
bySIMON LEE
THANKS TO SIGNIFICANT loans from the Musée du Louvre, the Musée Ingres, Montauban and from other major European and North American institutions, the exhibition Ingres at the Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid (to 27th March), is the first ever exhibition in Spain to be devoted to the Montalbanais master. The show, comprising almost seventy works, adopts both a chronological and thematic framework. Displayed in ten rooms on the ground floor of the Museum’s temporary exhibitions spaces in the Jerónimos extension, eleven separate aspects of Ingres’s activity are covered, including ‘early official portraits’, Rome and the myths of art, ‘captive women’, ‘sumptuous nudity’ and ‘late portraits’ –categories that correspond to the trajectory of much recent Ingres scholarship.
This exhibition represents a considerable coup for the Prado, and the curators have negotiated the loans of such key paintings as the 1801 Prix-de-Rome-winning Ambassadors of Agamennon, Napoleon as First Consul (cat. no.5) Napoleon on the Imperial throne, The dream of Ossian, La Grande odalisque, Monsieur Bertin, The Turkish bath, Countess d’Haussonville and the sitting and standing portraits of Madame Moitessier. Drawings and studies are sparsely, but tellingly, interspersed with paintings to give valuable insights into Ingres’s methodical yet obsessive creative process.
In the nineteenth century, Spain was practically an Ingres-free zone, but this exhibition makes the most of the few tangible connections. His sole Spanish commission came in 1816–18 from Carlos Miguel, 14th Duke of Alba (1794–1835), who succeeded his flamboyant cousin Cayetana (Goya’s famous Duchess of Alba) to the title. The Duke was in Rome, taking a strategic Grand Tour to absent himself from Madrid at the restoration of Ferdinand VII, after having supported the brief régime of Napoleon’s brother, Joseph. Through the Duke’s Roman representative, the Belgian Guillaume-Ange Poublon (himself drawn by Ingres in 1817; Musée des Beaux Arts, Dijon), three or perhaps four small-scale paintings commemorating key moments from the history of the House of Alba were proposed, but only one was finished: Philip V of Spain investing the Marshal of Berwick with the Golden Fleece. Completed in 1818, it remains in the Alba collection and is represented in the exhibition by two watercolours and a gouache (nos.40, 41 and 42) produced by Ingres for his wife in 1864. A further Alba connection is provided in the exhibition with the recently identified portrait drawing of the Duke’s mother, the Marquesa de Ariaza and her daughter, Elena de Palafox (no.33). Tragically, the Marquesa died soon after sitting for Ingres and this probably explains why the portrait never reached the Alba collection.
Ingres, however, knew a number of Spanish artists, and these connections began in JacquesLouis David’s studio where he encountered the painters José Aparicio (1770–1838) and José de Madrazo (1781–1859), and the sculptor José Álvarez Cubero (1768–1827). These relationships continued as all three Spaniards spent long periods in Rome and Ingres also formed a firm friendship with Madrazo’s son Federico (1815–94), who was twice Director of the Prado.
For Napoleon’s bedroom in the Quirinal (which he never occupied) Ingres was entrusted with a subject from one of the Emperor’s favourite authors: The dream of Ossian (no.16; Fig.94). This painting is displayed advantageously to allow inspection of the many changes wrought to the original after Ingres bought the picture back around 1835 while Director of the Académie de France in Rome. The change in format (from square to circular or vice versa), the additional figures either
side of the sleeping bard and the changes in modelling attest to a fanatical re-working and indefatigable search for ultimate resolution that caused Ingres to leave works unresolved or unfinished. Fortunately, the viewer can assess Ossian prior to the ‘improvements’ with the display of the watercolour Ingres sent to his lifelong friend, the lawyer Jean-François Gilibert (no.16).
Another Roman Napoleonic commission, Virgil reading the Aeneid to Augustus and Livia, was painted in 1811–12 for General Sextus Miollis, Governor of Rome, for the bedroom of his residence, the Palazzo Aldobrandini. Wanting to demonstrate to the Parisian public his progress in Italy, Ingres requested the loan of the Aldobrandini picture for the 1814 Salon and, when Miollis refused, a replica or variant was produced and this version is displayed in the exhibition (no.21). However, both pictures were subjected to Ingres’s habitual re-working. The Aldobrandini
original was also repurchased and multiple alterations ensured the work was unfinished at Ingres’s death. Even the variant was not immune, and what now remains is an abbreviated version, stripped of its interior setting and minus Virgil.
Ingres’s time in Rome was marked by financial insecurity, and the need to sell modest-sized works to private clients explains his excursions into the genre historique and his interpretations of scenes from the Middle Ages and Renaissance. In Roger rescuing Angelica (no.46; Fig.96), a government commission exhibited at the 1819 Salon, Ariosto’s tale gave Ingres the opportunity to combine medieval visual sources with his own fertile imagination. The result was a disconcerting hybrid of hyper-realism and fantasy that puzzled and upset many critics. The largescale rectangular original is paired with the much smaller oval canvas produced over two
decades later (no.47). Inmany ways the reduced format is more convincing, as it intensifies the tension and action and provides a more intimate experience.
For Ingres the female nude was the locus of numerous artistic concerns and habitual preoccupations. La Grande odalisque (no.19; Fig.95) is displayed at eye level, affording ample opportunity to study this extraordinarily boneless and impossibly elongated figure and the padded luxury in which she luxuriates. Ingres embellished the visual experience with a symphony of other sensual pleasures –the tactile appeal of silk, fur and velvet, the olfactory and heady delights of incense, tobacco and opium and the caressing of the odalisque’s flesh by the peacock fan. Similarly, the show’s penultimate room, ‘Sumptuous nudity’, is dominated by The Turkish bath (no.67) – a compendium, a lifetime’s experience of studying the female
model and perhapsthe erotic daydream of an octogenarian artist. For Ingres the model was only the starting-point in a process that re-fashioned human anatomy to his own particular conception of beauty.
The exhibition provides a comprehensive treatment of all aspects of Ingres’s portraiture. Napoleon on the Imperial throne (no.13) has a wall to itself, and the effect is that of an altarpiece and the inevitable conclusion that the viewer should kneel before the deity. Such close proximity also allows detailed scrutiny, and the eagle on the carpet and other elements of the design are much more broadly painted than one might first think. Within Ingres’s œuvre one constantly experiences areas of relatively loose painting juxtaposed with passages of exquisite and precise detail.
The span of later portraits includes Monsieur Bertin (no.54), ‘the buddha of the bourgeoisie’, and culminates with the series of society hostesses from the 1840s and 1850s. Both versions of Madame Moitessier (nos.64 and 65) are present, indicating both the sitter’s domestic sphere and her imminent entry into the public arena. The cross-fertilisation that often existed between different areas of Ingres’s activity is demonstrated with the borrowing of Stratonice’s pose from Antiochus and Stratonice (no.25) for the Countess d’Haussonville – or ‘Our pretty little wild vicomtesse’, as Ingres called her (no.63).
The catalogue contains five essays that provide a context for Ingres’s career and influences.1 Unfortunately, no English edition has been issued and so the readership for these valuable essays, especially those by Carlos G. Navarro and Florence Viguier-Dutheil, will inevitably be limited.
1 Catalogue: Ingres. Edited by Vincent Pomarède and Carlos G. Navarro, with contributions by the editors and Carmen Sanz Ayán, Louis-Antoine Prat and Florence Viguier-Dutheil. 363 pp. incl. 196 col. pls. (Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid, 2015), €33.25. ISBN 978–84–8480–321–8.