The French Revolution And Its Influence On Art

(via The Outline of Art) William Orpen writes:

Though he gained the prize in 1801, Ingres was not sent to Rome till 1806, and then he remained in Italy for nearly eighteen years. These were years of quiet, fruitful labor, during which the artist, in his own words, was ‘drawing to learn and painting to live,’ and by living abroad he escaped all that contemporary drama of victories and disasters, of changes of dynasties and changes of opinion, that was going on during this period in his own country. Nevertheless, they attracted attention in the Salons, though they were criticised by the followers of David. When he exhibited in 1819 his ‘Paola and Francesca di Rimini,’ the work was pronounced to be ‘Gothic’ in tendency, and in this small historical painting we can recognize the influence of the Primitives whom Ingres admired for the purity and precision of their drawing.

When Igres returned to Paris in 1824 the battle between the Classicists and the Romanticists was in full swing, and with Girodet dead, David in exile and dying, and Gros incompetent, the former were glad to welcome the support of Ingres, and soon made him the chief of their party. Ingres was amazed and enchanted at his sudden popularity and the honors now thrust upon him. He was speedily elected to Institute, and later was made a Grand Officer of the Legion of Honor and a Senator. The full story of the war between the Classicists and Romanticists must be reserved for a later chapter, but it may be said at once that Ingres threw himself heart and soul into the championship of the classics by precepts and example.

But where Ingres differed from his predecessor David was, that with him it was the treatment rather than the subject which was all important. A fanatic for drawing from the first, he held strong and peculiar views on Color. ‘A thing well drawn is always well enough painted,’ he said; and his own use of color was merely to emphasize the drawing in his pictures. ‘Rubens and Vandyck,’ he argued, ‘may please the eye, but they deceive it—they belong to a bad school of Color, the School of Falsehood.’ From his early Roman days Ingres had shown himself to be faultless draughtsman of the human figure, and his drawings and paintings of nudes are the works on which his fame most surely rests today. The most celebrated, and perhaps the most beautiful, of his works, ‘La Source’, has an interesting history, for, though begun as a study in 1824, it was not till 1856, when the artist was seventy six, that he turned it into a picture. One of the most precious gems of painting in the Louvre, this picture preserves the freshness of a young man’s fancy while it is executed with the knowledge of a lifetime. ‘It is a fragment of Nature, and it is a vision,’ is the comment of a great French critic on this picture.

If Ingres was the greatest artist the classical movement produced in France, yet he belongs too much to the nineteenth century to be considered a true product of the revolutionary and Napoleonic period. Indeed, the greatest Continental artist of that period was not a Frenchman, and it is to Spain that we must turn to find a man of oustanding genius whose protean art fully expresses the surging thoughts and feelings of this time of changes.

The French Revolution And Its Influence On Art (continued)