Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres French School, 1780-1867

 

 

 

Born in 1780 in the southern French town of Montauban, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres had early instruction from his father, an artist in the town's employ. The boy showed a precocious musical and artistic talent. Aged twelve, he was enrolled at the Academy of Toulouse, under the painter Joseph Roques, a friend of Jacques-Louis David. In 1797 he left for Paris to study with David who recognized his talent and used him as his assistant in the execution of the Portrait of Madame Récamier. Admitted to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Ingres won the Rome Prize of 1801. While a shortage of state funds delayed his departure for Italy, he lived in a community of young artists housed in a disused monastery. In addition to a few public commissions (including two portraits of Napoleon), Ingres painted his first portraits.

 

In 1806 Ingres finally took his place among the pensioners of the French Academy in Rome. Several masterly portraits mark the early years of his Roman stay, among them those of Mrs. Devauçay (1807, Musée Condé, Chantilly) and of François-Marius Granet (c. 1807, Musée Granet, Aix-en-Provence). Required to show proof of his progress, he submitted deeply calculated studies of the nude, finished off by the addition of narrative detail, Oedipus and the Sphinx and the "Valpincon Bather" in 1808 (both, Louvre) and Jupiter and Thetis in 1811 (Musée Granet, Aix-en-Provence). After his stipend expired in 1810, he prolonged his stay in Rome by making portraits of members of the French community. Caroline Murat, sister of the emperor and queen of Naples, commissioned two historical paintings from him in the ‘troubadour’ style, The Betrothal of Raphael (Walters Art Museum – Baltimore) and Paolo and Francesca (Musée Condé – Chantilly), as well as the Grande Odalisque (1814, Louvre), a companion piece to the Dormeuse de Naples, already in the possession of the Murats and missing since 1815.

 

In 1814 the collapse of the French government in Rome deprived Ingres of patronage and reduced him to making a meager living for himself and Madeleine Chapelle, his young bride, by drawing portraits of visiting foreigners.

 

In 1817 Ingres received his first major commission from the Restoration government then in the process of refurbishing churches neglected since the Revolution. It called for an altarpiece representing Christ Delivering the Keys to Saint Peter to be installed in the French church of Santa Trinita dei Monti in Rome (1820, now Musée Ingres, Montauban) and was followed in 1820 by an even larger charge, the execution of The Vow of Louis XIII (completed 1824) for the cathedral of Montauban, Ingres' native city. Ingres, who had meanwhile moved to Florence in 1824, accompanied The Vow of Louis XIII to Paris, where it won a resounding success at the Salon.

 

2. The Pisanello medal

 

Ingres drew inspiration here from the medal depicting Sigismund Malatesta, painted by Pisanello in 1445. Sigismund Malatesta (Italian: Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta) (June 19, 1417 in Brescia - October 7, 1468 in Rimini), lord of Rimini, Fano and Cesena, was a condottiere of the Malatesta family, lords of Rimini from 1295 to 1500. Considered by his contemporaries to be one of the most formidable military leaders of his time, he commissioned the construction of the Tempio Malatestiano in Rimini, one of the first Renaissance-style buildings in Italy built to a design by Alberti.

 

As Sylvain Bédard reminds us, Ingres' interest in numismatics is well known. Indeed, during his first stay in Italy, from 1806 to 1824 (including the Florentine period, from 1820 to 1824), Ingres collected casts of ancient and modern medals[1], as he was unable to acquire the originals. These casts, which he kept throughout his life, were donated to the Montauban museum in 1867. It was only natural that he should take an interest in the medal depicting one of the leading figures of the Quattrocento, created by Italy's first medal-maker.

 

3. Dating proposal for the drawing

 

We believe that this drawing should be linked to Ingres' first stay in Italy. In addition to Ingres's interest in medals, we think it is interesting to relate the figure of Sigismund Malatesta to the commission probably received in 1813 from the Queen of Naples for a painting depicting Paolo and Francesca (Musée Condé – Chantilly).

 

The subject is taken from a famous episode in Canto V of Inferno in Dante's Divine Comedy, and more specifically from the passage where Francesca Malatesta and her young brother-in-law, Paolo, discover their passion while reading the story of Lancelot's adulterous love for Queen Guinevere. A kiss is exchanged, but Francesca's husband, Gianciotto, is already about to emerge from the shadows to draw his sword and punish the two lovers.

 

Paolo Malatesta (ca. 1246 - ca. 1285) lived almost two centuries before Sigismund, but it seems quite plausible to us that Ingres was interested in this medal when he was researching documentation on the story of Paolo and Francesca, which would lead us to date this drawing to around 1813-1814.

 

As Sylvain Bédard also points out, "the inscription at the top of the sheet is almost in itself a painter's signature. Ingres's ever-shaky hand, when it comes to tracing print characters (surprisingly enough, for this extraordinary draughtsman!), is once again evident here. We can compare the shape of the letters in this portrait with those in other drawings in Montauban (Domine Salvum Fac Regem - Montauban Museum[2]). Another example of the use of these print characters can be found in the portrait of architect Guillaume-Edouard Allais, dated 1814 (Moskowitz collection, Long Island (New York).

 

4. Comparison with other artworks by Ingres

 

Executed from a medal, our drawing retains a certain ambiguity: although enlarged to portrait size, it is characterized by the sharp contrasts between the shadows delineating the profile and the immaculate background. It is thus more reminiscent of the bas-relief work of the medallist than of the portraitist's art. To render the vigorous modeling of the chasing, Ingres reworked Malatesta's graphite portrait with an stump, a cylindrical tool covered in soft paper.

 

Both in concept and technique, our drawing is a remarkable example of drawing "d'après la bosse", as students at the Académie learned by drawing from plaster or metal models. Ingres pays particular attention to the way the medal absorbs or reflects light, using a range of elaborate half-tones.                                                                                                    

 

In this drawing, we find the often slightly sculptural character of some of the painter's profiles. An example is the head of Emperor Augustus in the painting in the Musée Royal des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, Augustus Listening to the Reading of the Aeneid, also painted around 1814.

 

While Ingres had somewhat abandoned the round format favored for his portrait drawings at the very beginning of his career, it is also interesting to compare our drawing with the portrait of Alexandre-Michel Beljame, created in 1812. With a round format of and a diameter of 160 mm, this profile portrait with its blurred shadows is reminiscent of a medal.

 

If we look closely at Malatesta's ear, which is very rounded in shape, it appears to be very similar to the one found in a reproduction (also in blur) of the lone head of Mary, taken from Raphael's Madonna of the Chair, a drawing also belonging to the Musée Ingres-Bourdelle [3] . The isolated study of an ear, also in Montauban, also appears to be in the same style. [4]

 

5. Provenance

 

A graphite inscription on the reverse of our portrait indicates that it comes from a direct descendant of Jules Cambon. There was a famous Cambon family in Montauban, distant cousins of Ingres, to which belonged the painter Armand Cambon (1819-1885), a pupil of the artist who was to become the first director of the Montauban museum, but none of the members of this family was named Jules. We think it more rational to assume that he was rather the diplomat and academician Jules Cambon (Paris 1845 - Vevey 1935), who was a collector. [5]

 

The younger brother of ambassador Paul Cambon (1843-1924), Jules Cambon also distinguished himself in diplomacy. After studying law, he became a lawyer in 1866. He then joined the administration, becoming an auditor on the provisional commission that replaced the Conseil d'État.

 

In 1874, he continued his career in Algeria, first at the Direction Générale des Affaires Civiles, then as Prefect of Constantine. In the years that followed, he was Secretary General of the Paris Police Prefecture (1879), Prefect of the Nord (1882), then of the Rhône (1887). He returned to Algeria in 1891 as Governor General, and in 1897 was appointed French Ambassador to the United States. In this capacity, he negotiated peace between Spain and the United States in 1897.

 

From 1902 to 1907, he succeeded his brother as French ambassador to Spain. Appointed to Berlin in 1907, he worked tirelessly to ease Franco-German relations and safeguard peace. After the First World War, he helped draw up the peace treaty, then became Secretary General at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and finally President of the Conference of Ambassadors.

 

This diplomat, who had rendered great services and whose word was an authority in government circles, was elected to the Académie Française on May 16, 1918.

 

6. Framing

 

This drawing is presented in an early 19th century Italian painted wood frame decorated with a frieze of gilded water leaves.

Georges Vigne - Ingres - Abbeville Press 1995

Georges Vigne - Dessins d'Ingres - Catalogue raisonné des dessins du Musée de Montauban - Gallimard 1995

(under the direction of) Vincent Pomarède, Stéphane Guégan, Louis-Antoine Prat and Eric Bertin  - Catalogue of the Ingres exhibition at the Musée du Louvre (February 24 2006 - May 15 2006) - Gallimard/ Musée du Louvre 2006

Jean de Foville - Pisanello and the Italian Medalists - Henri Laurens