The Road of Raphael

In the course of a lifetime that stretched from 1780 to 1867. Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres was reviled and honored and reviled again, but he scorned both tribute and taunt. "I took the road of the masters." he told his students. "That is what I did, gentlemen; I took the road of Raphael." This week 73 of his masterly drawings and paintings went on display at Manhattan's Paul Rosenberg Gallery, thus bringing together for the first time the bulk of Ingres' works owned by U.S. museums and collectors. The gallery professed itself pleasantly surprised that such "an important and unsuspected corpus of pictures by Ingres" existed in the U.S.

Ingres (pronounced like angry with the y cut off) traveled the road of the masters almost from his childhood in the Gascon town of Montauban. At nine he was already turning out drawings of astonishing maturity, and in 1797, when he was 17, he joined the Paris studio of the great classicist Jacques Louis David. But while David's figures remained solid and heroic, those of Ingres soon became pliant and touched with elegance. David took his inspiration from ancient Rome, and painted frequently from Roman statues. Ingres was struck by the Italian Renaissance primitives, by early Greek and Etruscan art, and above all by Raphael, who so gracefully bridged the worlds of the natural and the ideal. Because of his admiration for the primitives, the Davidians denounced him for returning "to the childhood of nature."

The Wolf in the Sheepfold. To their artistic differences, master and disciple then added political ones. David was a passionate partisan of the Revolution; Ingres seemed wholly indifferent to the comings and goings of monarchies, republics and empires. He painted Napoleon as First Consul and Emperor, and when the Bourbons came back, he painted them too. He did a portrait of Louis Phillipe's oldest son, and during the Second Empire he turned out more Napoleons.

As the Davidians receded into the new artist competitors loomed. The most threatening: Eugene Delacroix. Ingres was now the champion of classicism, though it was his own brand. Delacroix and his followers were romantics who worshiped not Raphael but Rubens. While Ingres exalted line and form and insisted that the brush stroke should never be visible, the new painters reveled in color and pigment. "Yes. to be sure," grumped Ingres, "Rubens was a great painter, but he is that great painter who has ruined every thing." He flatly refused to let his students even look at the Rubenses in the Louvre. When, years after Ingres was elected to the French Academy, Delacroix was also chosen. Ingres roared with indignation: "Now the wolf is loose in the sheepfold!"

Probity with Ardor. As the years went by, Ingres became a querulous, touchy man. so sensitive that his wife would shield his eyes with a shawl to keep him from seeing a deformed beggar in the street. For all his crotchets, Ingres remained true to himself. "Drawing is the probity of art." he said, and he would make as many as 100 sketches before deciding how to place a single arm in a painting. Though he turned out his share of pretentious failures, he was always the master of composition. And despite his apparent indifference to color, such canvases as The Entry into Paris could glow like satin.

Though he insisted that he was primarily "a painter of history," he was at his best when painting the individual. His portraits were the work of a man who could lay bare the heart of another. His women bathers, as Baudelaire observed, were painted "with the ardor of a lover." They were creatures from a far-off world, and however dimly lit their flesh or well-ordered their surroundings, they told much about their creator.

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