Drawing of hand possibly by Jean Auguste Ingres, signed Ingres in pencil.
Drawing: 8.5" x 10"

From an important collection of rare art assembled over the lifetime of a known Russian artist, who is suffering dementia in her final years.

Jean Auguste Ingres
(Source: Wiki)Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (/ˈæŋɡrə, ˈæ̃ɡrə/ ANG-grə, French: [ʒɑ̃ oɡyst dɔminik ɛ̃ɡʁ]; 29 August 1780 – 14 January 1867) was a French Neoclassical painter. Ingres was profoundly influenced by past artistic traditions and aspired to become the guardian of academic orthodoxy against the ascendant Romantic style. Although he considered himself a painter of history in the tradition of Nicolas Poussin and Jacques-Louis David, it is his portraits, both painted and drawn, that are recognized as his greatest legacy. His expressive distortions of form and space made him an important precursor of modern art, influencing Picasso, Matisse and other modernists.

Born into a modest family in Montauban, he travelled to Paris to study in the studio of David. In 1802 he made his Salon debut, and won the Prix de Rome for his painting The Ambassadors of Agamemnon in the tent of Achilles. By the time he departed in 1806 for his residency in Rome, his style—revealing his close study of Italian and Flemish Renaissance masters—was fully developed, and would change little for the rest of his life. While working in Rome and subsequently Florence from 1806 to 1824, he regularly sent paintings to the Paris Salon, where they were faulted by critics who found his style bizarre and archaic. He received few commissions during this period for the history paintings he aspired to paint, but was able to support himself and his wife as a portrait painter and draughtsman.

He was finally recognized at the Salon in 1824, when his Raphaelesque painting, The Vow of Louis XIII, was met with acclaim, and Ingres was acknowledged as the leader of the Neoclassical school in France. Although the income from commissions for history paintings allowed him to paint fewer portraits, his Portrait of Monsieur Bertin marked his next popular success in 1833. The following year, his indignation at the harsh criticism of his ambitious composition The Martyrdom of Saint Symphorian caused him to return to Italy, where he assumed directorship of the French Academy in Rome in 1835. He returned to Paris for good in 1841. In his later years he painted new versions of many of his earlier compositions, a series of designs for stained glass windows, several important portraits of women, and The Turkish Bath, the last of his several Orientalist paintings of the female nude, which he finished at the age of 83.

Early years: Montauban and Toulouse
Ingres was born in Montauban, Tarn-et-Garonne, France, the first of seven children (five of whom survived infancy) of Jean-Marie-Joseph Ingres (1755–1814) and his wife Anne Moulet (1758–1817). His father was a successful jack-of-all-trades in the arts, a painter of miniatures, sculptor, decorative stonemason, and amateur musician; his mother was the nearly illiterate daughter of a master wigmaker.[2] From his father the young Ingres received early encouragement and instruction in drawing and music, and his first known drawing, a study after an antique cast, was made in 1789.[3] Starting in 1786, he attended the local school École des Frères de l'Éducation Chrétienne, but his education was disrupted by the turmoil of the French Revolution, and the closing of the school in 1791 marked the end of his conventional education. The deficiency in his schooling would always remain for him a source of insecurity.[4]

In 1791, Joseph Ingres took his son to Toulouse, where the young Jean-Auguste-Dominique was enrolled in the Académie Royale de Peinture, Sculpture et Architecture. There he studied under the sculptor Jean-Pierre Vigan, the landscape painter Jean Briant, and the neoclassical painter Guillaume-Joseph Roques. Roques' veneration of Raphael was a decisive influence on the young artist.[5] Ingres won prizes in several disciplines, such as composition, "figure and antique", and life studies.[6] His musical talent was developed under the tutelage of the violinist Lejeune, and from the ages of thirteen to sixteen he played second violin in the Orchestre du Capitole de Toulouse.[6]

From an early age he was determined to be a history painter, which, in the hierarchy of artists established by the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture under Louis XIV, and continued well into the 19th Century, was considered the highest level of painting. He did not want to simply make portraits or illustrations of real life like his father; he wanted to represent the heroes of religion, history and mythology, to idealize them and show them in ways that explained their actions, rivaling the best works of literature and philosophy.[7]

In Paris (1797–1806)
In March 1797, the Academy awarded Ingres first prize in drawing, and in August he traveled to Paris to study in the studio of Jacques-Louis David, France's—and Europe's—leading painter during the revolutionary period, in whose studio he remained for four years. Ingres followed his master's neoclassical example.[8] In 1797 David was working on his enormous masterpiece, The Intervention of the Sabine Women, and was gradually modifying his style away from Roman models of rigorous realism to the ideals of purity, virtue and simplicity in Greek art.[9] One of the other students of David, Étienne-Jean Delecluze, who later became an art critic, described Ingres as a student:

He was distinguished not just by the candor of his character and his disposition to work alone ... he was one of the most studious ... he took little part in the all the turbulent follies around him, and he studied with more perseverance than most of his co-disciples ... All of the qualities which characterize today the talent of this artist, the finesse of contour, the true and profound sentiment of the form, and a modeling with extraordinary correctness and firmness, could already be seen in his early studies. While several of his comrades and David himself signaled a tendency toward exaggeration in his studies, everyone was struck by his grand compositions and recognized his talent.[10]

He was admitted to the painting department of the École des Beaux-Arts in October 1799. In 1800 and 1801, he won the grand prize for figure painting for his paintings of male torsos.[11] In 1800 and 1801 he also competed for the Prix de Rome, the highest prize of the Academy, which entitled the winner to four years of residence at the Académie de France in Rome. He came in second in his first attempt, but in 1801 he took the top prize with The Ambassadors of Agamemnon in the tent of Achilles. The figures of the envoys, in the right of the painting, are muscular and solid as statues, in the style taught by David, but the two main figures on the left, Achilles and Patroclus, are mobile, vivid and graceful, like figures in a delicate bas-relief.[12]

His residence in Rome was postponed until 1806 due to shortage of state funds. In the meantime he worked in Paris alongside several other students of David in a studio provided by the state, and further developed a style that emphasized purity of contour. He found inspiration in the works of Raphael, in Etruscan vase paintings, and in the outline engravings of the English artist John Flaxman.[6] His drawings of Hermaphrodite and the Nymph Salmacis showed a new stylized ideal of female beauty, which would reappear later in his Jupiter et Thetis and his famous nudes.

In 1802 he made his debut at the Salon with Portrait of a Woman (the current whereabouts of which is unknown). Between 1804 and 1806 he painted a series of portraits which were striking for their extreme precision, particularly in the richness of their fabrics and tiny details. These included the Portrait of Philipbert Riviére (1805), Portrait of Sabine Rivière (1805–06), Portrait of Madame Aymon (also known as La Belle Zélie; 1806), and Portrait of Caroline Rivière (1805–06). The female faces were not at all detailed but were softened, and were notable for their large oval eyes and delicate flesh colours and their rather dreamlike expressions. His portraits typically had simple backgrounds of solid dark or light colour, or of sky. These were the beginning of a series that would make him among the most celebrated portrait artists of the 19th century.[14]

As Ingres waited to depart to Rome, his friend Lorenzo Bartolini introduced him to Italian Renaissance paintings, particularly the works Bronzino and Pontormo, which Napoleon had brought back from his campaign in Italy and placed in the Louvre. Ingres assimilated their clarity and monumentality into his own portrait style. In the Louvre were also masterpieces of Flemish art, including the Ghent Altarpiece by Jan van Eyck, which the French army had seized during its conquest of Flanders. The precision of Renaissance Flemish art became part of Ingres's style.[15] Ingres's stylistic eclecticism represented a new tendency in art. The Louvre, newly filled with booty seized by Napoleon in his campaigns in Italy and the Low Countries, provided French artists of the early 19th century with an unprecedented opportunity to study, compare, and copy masterworks from antiquity and from the entire history of European painting.[16] As art historian Marjorie Cohn has written: "At the time, art history as a scholarly enquiry was brand-new. Artists and critics outdid each other in their attempts to identify, interpret, and exploit what they were just beginning to perceive as historical stylistic developments."[17] From the beginning of his career, Ingres freely borrowed from earlier art, adopting the historical style appropriate to his subject, and was consequently accused by critics of plundering the past.

In 1803 he received a prestigious commission, being one of five artists selected (along with Jean-Baptiste Greuze, Robert Lefèvre, Charles Meynier, and Marie-Guillemine Benoist) to paint full-length portraits of Napoleon Bonaparte as First Consul. These were to be distributed to the prefectural towns of Liège, Antwerp, Dunkerque, Brussels, and Ghent, all of which were newly ceded to France in the 1801 Treaty of Lunéville.[18] Napoleon is not known to have granted the artists a sitting, and Ingres's meticulously painted portrait of Bonaparte, First Consul appears to be modelled on an image of Napoleon painted by Antoine-Jean Gros in 1802.

In the summer of 1806, Ingres became engaged to Marie-Anne-Julie Forestier, a painter and musician, before leaving for Rome in September. Although he had hoped to stay in Paris long enough to witness the opening of that year's Salon, in which he was to display several works, he reluctantly left for Italy just days before the opening.

Ingres painted a new portrait of Napoleon for presentation at the 1806 Salon, this one showing Napoleon on the Imperial Throne for his coronation. This painting was entirely different from his earlier portrait of Napoleon as First Consul; it concentrated almost entirely on the lavish imperial costume that Napoleon had chosen to wear, and the symbols of power he held. The scepter of Charles V, the sword of Charlemagne the rich fabrics, furs and capes, crown of gold leaves, golden chains and emblems were all presented in extremely precise detail; the Emperor's face and hands were almost lost in the majestic costume.

At the Salon, his paintings—Self-Portrait, portraits of the Rivière family, and Napoleon I on his Imperial Throne—received a very chilly reception.[22] David delivered a severe judgement,[3] and the critics were hostile. Chaussard (Le Pausanias Français, 1806) praised "the fineness of Ingres's brushwork and the finish", but condemned Ingres's style as gothic and asked:

How, with so much talent, a line so flawless, an attention to detail so thorough, has M. Ingres succeeded in painting a bad picture? The answer is that he wanted to do something singular, something extraordinary ... M. Ingres's intention is nothing less than to make art regress by four centuries, to carry us back to its infancy, to revive the manner of Jean de Bruges.

Director of the French Academy in Rome (1834–1841)
Ingres remained in Rome for six years. He devoted much of his attention to the training of the painting students, as he was later to do at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. He re-organized the Academy, increased the size of the library, added many molds of classical statues to the Academy collection, and assisted the students in getting public commissions in both Rome and Paris. He traveled to Orvieto (1835), Siena (1835), and to Ravenna and Urbino to study the paleochristian mosaics, medieval murals and Renaissance art.[68] He devoted considerable attention to music, one of the subjects of the academy; he welcomed Franz Liszt and Fanny Mendelssohn. He formed a long friendship with Liszt.[69] The composer Charles Gounod, who was a pensioner at the time at the Academy, described Ingres's appreciation of modern music, including Weber and Berlioz, and his adoration for Beethoven, Haydn, Mozart and Gluck. He joined the music students and his friend Niccolò Paganini in playing Beethoven's violin works.[68] Gounod wrote that Ingres "had the tenderness of an infant and the indignation of an apostle." When Stendhal visited the Academy and disparaged Beethoven, Ingres turned to the doorman, indicated Stendahl, and told him, "If this gentleman ever calls again, I am not here."

His rancor against the Paris art establishment for his failure at the 1834 Salon did not abate. In 1836 he refused a major commission from the French Minister of the Interior, Adolphe Thiers, to decorate the interior of the Church of the Madeleine in Paris, because the commission had been offered first to a rival, Paul Delaroche, who refused it.[68] He did complete a small number of works which he sent to patrons in Paris. One was L'Odalisque et l'esclave, (1839), a portrait of a blonde odalisque, or member of a harem, who reclines languorously while a turbaned musician plays. This fitted into the popular genre of orientalism; his rival Eugène Delacroix had created a painting on a similar theme, Les Femmes d'Alger, for the 1834 Salon. The setting was inspired by Persian miniatures and was full of exotic detail, but the woman's long reclining form was pure Ingres. The critic Théophile Gautier wrote of Ingres's work: "It is impossible to better paint the mystery, the silence and the suffocating atmosphere of the seraglio." In 1842 he painted a second version, nearly identical to the first but with a landscape background (painted by his student Paul Flandrin).[71]

The Illness of Antiochus (1840), Musee Conde, ChantillyThe second painting he sent, in 1840, was The Illness of Antiochus (1840; also known as Aniochus and Stratonice) a history painting on a theme of love and sacrifice, a theme once painted by David in 1800, when Ingres was in his studio. It was commissioned by the Duc d'Orleans, the son of King Louis Philippe I), and had very elaborate architectural background designed by one of the Academy students, Victor Baltard, the future architect of the Paris market Les Halles. The central figure was an ethereal woman in white, whose contemplative pose with her hand on her chin recurs in some of Ingres's female portraits.[72]

His painting of Aniochius and Stratonice, despite its small size, just one meter, was a major success for Ingres. In August it was shown in the private apartment of the duc d'Orléans in the Pavilion Marsan of the Palais des Tuileries.[73] The King greeted him personally at Versailles and gave him a tour of the Palace. He was offered a commission to paint a portrait of the Duke, the heir to the throne, and another from the Duc de Lunyes to create two huge murals for the Château de Dampierre. In April 1841 he returned definitively to Paris.

Good condition overall