Master of Line

"Form," declared Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, "is the foundation and the condition of all things. Smoke itself should be rendered by a line." Fittingly, the exhibit commemorating the centennial of his death, which opens at Harvard's Fogg Museum this week, concentrates on his drawings and water-colors (see color). For it was through the lines of his draftsmanship that Ingres was able to reconcile the stern classical disciplines of the 18th century with 19th century Romantic sensuality.

"Voyez-vous, rnon enfant," he would exhort a student. "Drawing is the first virtue of a painter. It is the foundation, it is everything: a thing well drawn is always well enough painted." Ingres followed his own advice. His earliest drawing (of a head) was made in 1789, when he was nine. By the time he was 17, he was a pupil in the Paris studio of Napoleon's court painter, Jacques-Louis David, and was contributing sketches for David's Mme. Recamier.

Attic Simplicity. Ingres sketched incessantly: friends, neighbors, nudes. His favored exemplars were the pure forms of Greek sculpture, together with Raphael. His extraordinary ability to capture likenesses won him a portrait commission from the Emperor and the government's Prix de Rome. Using the prize money, he moved to Rome in 1806, lived in Italy for most of the next 35 years.

He amused himself playing fiddle with a friendly foursome that Paganini organized, supported himself and his wife by teaching and doing sketches and portraits of well-to-do visiting French couples. Among his patrons was Napoleon's brother, Lucien. Ingres painted Lucien's burgeoning family with Attic simplicity.

Sinuous Odalisques. Ironically, while Ingres cared little about them, his oil portraits and sketches are today more highly prized than his pretentious and cluttered "classical" set pieces on subjects such as the Apotheosis of Homer. No matter how classical his tastes, Ingres was infected with Romanticism. His sinuous, elongated odalisques contributed to the 19th century vogue for the Oriental.

Even when he reached his 80s, and his failing strength kept him from large canvases, he continued his search for linear grace in watercolor. For one of his last works, Ingres returned to a favorite subject, a harem nude. His earlier versions had shown her against a background of bathing slave girls; his final version simplified the scene to what it had actually been, a studio pose. And though rendered in watercolor--a lesser medium than oil--The Bather is, if anything, finer than his youthful version of some 60 years before. It was the final proof of his lifetime maxim: "The simpler the lines and forms are, the more there is of beauty and strength."

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