Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres (1780-1867) of the neo-Classicist school and Theodore Gericault (1791-1824) of the romantic school.
Ken Segan
Paper: Nineteenth Century Art History
© A. K. Segan
March 1977 (my senior year)
Instructor: Associate Art History Professor George Mavigliano.
School of Art.
Southern Illinois University, Carbondale.
Grade: “A – good job”
For my paper, I have chosen to write about the artists Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres (1780-1867) of the neo-Classicist school; and Theodore Gericault (1791-1824) of the romantic school. I have drawn my information from a number of books in my own collection, which I have written down at the conclusion of the paper.
Ingres inherited the high priesthood of the mantle of David, and became its staunchest supporter from the onslaught of younger artists. Ingres was the last important survivor of the neo-classic phase in the battle between the neo-classicists and the neo-baroques, seeming to revive the quarrel between the “Poussinistes” and the “Rubenistes.” The Poussinistes never practiced what they preached, and Ingres’ views were far more doctrinaire than his pictures. Ingres held that drawing was superior to painting, yet his painting (e.g. Odalisque) has a very rich sense of color, and the exotic subject matter would seem to be indicative of the Romantic movement. Ingres’ Louis Berlin is a masterpiece of psychological penetration and physical accuracy.
By the penetration of the foreign elements of the romantic school - an emphasis on sentimentality and emotion; a newly awakened interest in landscape and nature; a historicizing tendency; a new wave of spiritual interest in Catholicism; a taste for the ghastly, even the cruel; and finally, the inclination toward the primitive and archaic which resulted in the abstraction and reduction of art forms; rational classicism in the old sense was strongly shaken.
Gradually the reappearance of the two old currents, the linear and the coloristic became clearly discernible again. The new development along neo-Classicist trends had a strong concentration on line and structure. It was quite different from that of David, because of its strong absorption of romantic elements, especially that of archaizing abstraction. There was further, a shifting of the classical ideal from that of Roman antiquity toward the High Renaissance of Raphael. The leader of this movement was Ingres. As a linear classicist, Ingres was a deadly enemy of the coloristic, baroque romanticism of Delacroix; as an archaistic romantic he was opposed to the classicism of David and his adherents.
Through his triumph, in the Salon of 1824, of the “Vow of Louis XIII,” Ingres established himself as the leader of the conservative tendency. He was, no longer, as in his youth, counted as a revolutionary, or an opponent of the school of David. Ingres became a fanatic, defender of his neo-Classicist principles. He wasn’t so much drawn to fear by romanticism itself, or by the attacks on him by the so-called romantics, but by the new colorism and the freer manner of execution that went with it. So he tried to multiply the external props of his artistic power; thereby, he thought, furthering the true doctrines of the “School.” He became Professor at the Ecole des Beaux Arts; in 1834 he had himself named Horace Vernet’s successor at the French Academy in Rome, where he returned six years later to Paris with his reputation further enhanced; he became a member of the Institute, Senator, Grand Officer of the Legion of Honor, and maintained a famous school; in short, Ingres had a position that David didn’t even occupy.
In the long later years of his life, it is apparent to some that the only really worthwhile paintings are those that still show some traces of his youthful style. However, Ingres no longer wanted to have anything to do with his youthful ideas or his anti-Davidian revolt. The result was that in many of his more important pictures, Ingres became what has been called a “self-conscious” classicist.”
In his most famous picture, the “Apotheosis of Homer,” (Salon of 1827), it was originally designed as a ceiling design for a room in the Louvre, but painted as an immense easel picture without regard to its destined position. In addition, the images, of all the famous men of ancient and modern times, is stilted and unconvincing. Ingres lacked the imagination necessary for such an undertaking, as opposed to Raphael, or even David, who could have. This is also true of other pictures, such as “Martyrdom of St. Symphorien” (Cathedral of Autum, completed 1834) and “Stratonice” (Chantilly, 1840). With such pictures Ingre created the precedent for a kind of imitation-marble classicism giving the look of the cold, false splendor of an archaeological restoration. Ingres’ later historical canvases, such as “Francis I at the deathbed of Leonardo da Vinci” (1848), only reinforce this kind of pompous and sentimentality in painting.
The great work in Ingres’ oeuvre, the Louvre’s “Odalisque” is by far for some the purest of his works in comparison with his later single female figures.
To sum up, whenever Ingres stepped down his self-imagined throne to work more or less for himself, he showed an artistic power, an expression of a new creative vision. This new style, was both “classical” and its contrast – the gothic-archaic; it united the classical and the romantic. Out of all that Ingres produced during a long and arduous life, one could get nourishment only from the drawings and a few paintings; those few works that were impregnated by the “gothic” and the “archaic,” which thus took on that clear and abstract character which is also found in the Japanese drawings which the great draughtsmen-painters of the nineteenth century loved so much. And it is in this sense that it wasn’t the stilted neo-Classicists, more or less directly associated with his school, who were really Ingres followers, but Manet, Seurat and Degas.
Here are some quotes from the “Doctrine of Ingres.”: “Do you believe that I sent you to the Louvre to find ideal beauty, something different from that which is nature? Similar idiocies in ill-fated epochs brought about the decadence of art. I send you there because they are themselves nature; one must be nourished by them….”
“The figures of antiquity are only beautiful because they resemble the beauty of nature….and nature will always be beautiful when it resembles the beauties of antiquity.” “Raphael (is) a god, an inimitable being, absolute, incorruptible, and Poussin the most perfect of men.” Maurice Denis has commented: “To summarize, Ingres taught nature and its translation through drawing. But drawing is not a copy of the model. Beauty must be sought first. And what is beauty? It is what one discerns by frequenting the Greeks and Raphael…”
Gericault’s work bore no relation the Davidian tendency as it was established in the “schfol” or to its core important offshoot, the romantic-archaic classicism of Ingres. Great emotional excitement was inherent in Gericault’s character, and he developed naturally as a dynamic, baroque painter.
Gericault painted with a painterly expansion of forms and space, in contrast with his teacher, the painter Guerin, who painted in a manneristic, linear concept of the bodily contour. Among the paintings of his early period, one which had a great success was in the Salon of 1812, entitled the “Officer of the Imperial Guard.” It is a picture of fine passion and color, having an emphatic continuation of the Rubenist current.
During Gericault’s stay in Rome, he was greatly influenced by the Michaelangelo of the Sistine Chapel, particularly the “Last Judgement.” The influence was not immediately perceptible, but it lived on in Gericault and became apparent in his most important work, the “Raft of the Medusa.” The “Raft of the Medusa” painting he completed after his return to Paris, when he was searching for something inspirational to execute. It was at once contemporary and monumental, political and artistic, gruesomely sublime and fantastically adventurous.
With an unbelievable energy and enthusiasm that possessed him when he was gripped by an exciting problem, Gericault went to work. The story concerning the event, which was of scandalous and cause celebre proportions in France, did not just concern Gericault solely for political criticism or his passionate interest in the victims of injustice concerning the tragedy; it was rather that in his artistic imagination there at once emerged plastic images of the striking, tremendously impressive episodes of this marine disaster. The influence of Michaelangelo, of Gros, and other recent masters is apparent. There is a link in the painting with the high Baroque, where light contrasts are maintained, while color it purposely made more dusky and restrained. The worn out formulas of the Davidian school pale before this; Gericault does not represent hero’s, but heroism, the heroic endurance of the anonymous, suffering at the hands of fate and their fellow man; he lends them a pathos and a passion attained neither by his predecessors nor by his contemporaries.
Essentially Gericault remained a colorist, and his work is in sharp contrast of the school of David, and even to Gros, who in comparison seems to employ flat and local tones.
In Gericault’s paintings of horseraces, after his visit to England, he was able to capture a momentary scene in time which was only to be carried on later in the century by the Impressionists and Degas. In his portraits of the mad and insane, these were the representations which were entirely new in French painting.
It was Courbet, the leader of the school of French realism, who continued the vein of Gericault.
Bibliography
History of Art, by H.W. Janson. Prentice Hall and Harry Abrams, publishers
From the Classicists to the Impressionists: Art and Architecture in the Nineteenth Century; selected and edited by Elizabeth Gilmore Holt; Doubleday, 1966
David to Delacroix, by Walter Friedlaender; Harvard University Press, 1952 Realism, by Linda Nochlin; Penguin Books, 1971