A Timeless, Artful Complicity: Ingres, His Subjects and You

First in London, then in Washington and now here, in its final stop at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the enthusiastically received exhibition “Portraits by Ingres: Image of an Epoch” has struck a surprisingly deep chord.

Partly it’s a matter of rarity. Portraiture is today regarded as the greatest accomplishment of the French painter Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780-1867), even though he always placed his pictures of grand historical themes at the highest rung. More portraits have been gathered for this show than have been seen together in one place in more than a century, since Ingres’ memorial exhibition.

More to the point, though, Ingres’ portraits manifest an oddly contemporary frame of mind. Sumptuous and seductive in their decorative, gorgeously refined surfaces, they nonetheless insist that art is an activity of intellectual depth, power and resonance.

You won’t find this critical feature of Ingres’ art simply in the narrow (if glittering) range of sitters, from Napoleon and the duke of Orleans to the princess de Broglie and the viscountess Louise d’Haussonville. Together, the personages he painted are restricted to the ruling elite in early to mid-19th century France.

The relationship between sitter and painter was a dance of mutual benefit. Aristocrats courted the hugely successful artist, hoping to win his consent to immortalize their features with his famously facile pencil and brush. Meanwhile, he courted them, hoping to align himself with just the right noblemen and entrepreneurs navigating the inside track to power. It was a complex minuet, given a career that spanned a notoriously tumultuous era--the Napoleonic Empire, the Bourbon Restoration, the July Monarchy, the Second Republic and the Second Empire.

If Ingres wanted to be the greatest history painter in France, acclaimed heir to the classical tradition of Poussin and David, it wouldn’t hurt to flatter the vanity of certain dukes and princes along the way. His attraction to history painting lay precisely in the fact that, on the French Academy’s list of the most serious and important kinds of painting an artist could do, history was at the top. In his portraits, Ingres invested his sitters with something of the same sense of intellectual import.

The 1806 “Napoleon on His Imperial Throne” is an early, garish, over-the-top example. The larger-than-life canvas, painted at 26, just before the artist left for Italy as winner of the coveted Prix de Rome, shows the diminutive emperor seated on a gargantuan throne beneath acres of gold-embroidered velvet and ermine. The throne’s arched, gilded back frames his implacable head in a secular halo.

The painting groans under the weight of knowing references. It alludes to Napoleon’s sumptuous coronation, recalls the ancestral reign of Charlemagne, sports emblems of Italian states conquered by the emperor, mimics images of the pagan Roman god Jupiter and--just for a touch of total audacity--even echoes Jan and Hubert van Eyck’s dazzling 15th century depiction of God enthroned, from the famous Ghent Altarpiece.

Talk about showing off.

It isn’t known for sure whether this frankly propagandizing portrait was commissioned by the state or was a speculative work, calculated by an ambitious young artist to draw attention. Either way, its installation at the Salon of 1806 marked Ingres’ public debut--and the picture was promptly savaged by critics.

Specific reasons for the disparagement were many. Most could be summed up in a simple phrase: Too old-fashioned. (Paris isn’t world capital of style for nothing.) It’s worth wondering whether the criticisms, which stung Ingres deeply, didn’t in some small way impact his thinking about portraiture and fashion for the rest of his life. His greatest are certainly complex but with a decidedly lighter touch.

Consider the famous portrait of the viscountess d’Haussonville, finished almost 40 years later and hanging near the end of the exhibition. In dress and demeanor she’s the height of 1840s style, surrounded by interior accouterments of elite taste. (Velvet mantel covers, for example, were all the rage that decade.) As he did with Napoleon, Ingres links the viscountess with historical French aristocracy, notably a pivotal figure in the history of manners: Boucher’s famous 1756 portrait of Madame de Pompadour, dressed to the nines, shows her displayed before a mirror, a motif Ingres cleverly revived. It complicates the visual space, while suggesting that art trumps life’s simplistic reflections.

Louise d’Haussonville was the granddaughter of the celebrated writer Madame de Stael, and Ingres has taken care to show her as more than a wealthy, attractive idler. Her early-evening dress, ribboned hair, shawl on the adjacent chair and opera glasses on the mantle suggest she’s just come from (or is going to) the theater.

With head cocked and index finger raised to her jaw, she’s somewhere between outwardly flirtatious and inwardly contemplative. The cool palette of blue-grays, ivories and gold underscores a luxurious sense of thoughtful quietude.

Some regard Ingres to be icy and remote. Yet, in the same way that vivid color and aggressive painterliness have come to signify emotional passion, cool tones and restrained linearity have come to signify artistic thought. The chilliness is more accurately a sense of intense concentration and calculated maneuvering.

Ingres’ dazzling skill as a draftsman is abundantly laid out in the plethora of drawings that are a chief pleasure of the show. (In addition to the 40 paintings, a whopping 92 drawings provide a thorough, exhausting overview of every period of his career. Many of the drawings are finished works in themselves, rather than studies for paintings.) The painting of Louise d’Haussonville alone is accompanied by six preparatory studies in pencil.

It was not unusual for Ingres to do nude sketches--using a professional model rather than the actual sitter--then to “dress” it and use the sitter as needed along the way. Modest Mme. Moitessier, whose great 1851 portrait is also here, sued the widow Ingres in court to get custody of the nude studies for her commission, even though they display a model; the judge ruled that Ingres’ estate could keep them but forbade their public display without priggish Mme. Moitessier’s permission.

The Haussonville drawings show Ingres working out the pose, the composition, details of the dress, the cast of the head and more. There were likely many more studies than these six. Ingres began the portrait in 1841, when Louise was 23, but didn’t finish until four years later.

For him, such lengthy execution was not uncommon. One result, though, is a sense of absolutely convincing portrayal. Everything is where it is because it’s supposed to be there, according to the larger dynamic of a rigorously thought-through picture.

Even after you notice the sheer anatomical impossibility of the viscountess’ right arm, which seems to be attached to her rib cage rather than to her shoulder, you believe in the veracity of the stunning portrait. And so it is again and again in Ingres’ work, in which amazing physical distortions such as this were the rule rather than the exception.

Ingres invites you into a kind of artful complicity: You marvel at that audacious arm, rather than dismiss it. Looking at her looking at you, it’s as if you conceive her into being--and she, in turn, you.

Within a decade of Ingres’ death, linearity and an emphasis on careful preparatory drawing as signifiers of intellectual scrutiny were largely erased by the new generation of French artists known as Impressionists. In this magnificent and compelling exhibition, they return with a vengeance.

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* “Portraits by Ingres: Image of an Epoch,” Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Ave., New York, (212) 879-5500, through Jan. 2. Closed Monday.