(2 of 4)
The idea of an "unemotional" Ingres derives from a shallow reading of his paintings' surfaces--that smooth, continuous modeling of fleshy form, without emphatic brushstrokes or vigorous contrasts of tone, so different from the work of his archrival, Eugene Delacroix. But intensity is not a matter of thick or thin paint, high or low contrast. The long battle between the Romantics, led by Delacroix, and the Classicists, whose exemplar was Ingres, entailed some caricature of both its generals. Delacroix was not all fire, nor Ingres all ice. Ingres was an extremely passionate painter. His temperament was riddled with anxiety; sometimes, beset with difficult pictorial problems, he would break out in boils and ulcers. He loved music and played the violin all his life--le violon d'Ingres became a French term for the creative hobby of a gifted person; it gave him solace from the strain of painting. "I need it as much as Saul needed to have it, for his healing," he pointedly said, referring to the mad King of the Jews to whom David played the harp.
Ingres was brusque, dogmatic, and could brook no argument, especially not from his students at the French Academy in Rome. With Ingres, you either agreed or got out. Compared with him, Delacroix was a model of suavity and balance. Ingres's creative life was a testament to sublimation. His classicism sprang from intense feeling for nature, distilled through innumerable preliminary drawings. His decades in Italy showed him a living classicism, not the dead one of the academic plaster cast. He copied incessantly from the masters, as later painters--Degas, for instance--would copy him. Copying and invention were parts of the same process: the search for exactness and visual truth--"nature without exaggeration, without forced brilliance," as he said of Titian. The miracle of Ingres's talent was that his preparatory labors clarified the impulse without using it up. "Make lines, young man, many lines, from memory or from nature. It's in this way that you will become a good artist," he told Degas.
Making portraits was, for Ingres, a trying battleground between reality and representation. He could fill his history paintings with ideal types of human form and expression; he could give his nudes an extra vertebra or two; but a portraitist had no such liberty. In his portrait of the expatriate Roman society figure Marie-Genevieve-Marguerite de Senonnes (1814), you see what a singular balance he could strike between sensuality and detachment--a balance worthy of his own beau ideal, Raphael. She leans forward a little. Her eyes sparkle. She is all attention. She is a sexy-looking lady, a full-breasted bird in a nest of extravagant velvets and silks, her plump fingers encrusted with rings; yet the whole image is put together with perfect formal concision.