Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780 – 1867) was from a middle-class background and, after being educated in Tolosa, he moved to Paris in 1797 where he had the chance to study at David’s atelier. In 1801, when he was just 21 years old, Ingres won the Prix de Rome and thanks to it he had the opportunity to visit Italy for a short span of time. But then he decided to stay where he had been for over 25 years, 4 of them spent in Florence. Back in France, in 1825, he was elected member of the Academy of Fine Arts where he became professor in 1829. Between 1834 and 1841 he stayed again in Italy, precisely in Rome, in some kind of voluntary exile sprung from the several criticisms he received. When he came back to France, he didn’t get the success he deserved, probably because of his passion for italian Rinascimento (Renaissance). Ingres, contrarily to what people wanted to see in his works of art, went ahead with the the Romanticism theme and that’s why his Universal Exposition in 1855 did not succeed. In 1862 Ingres was nominated Senator and, few months after his death, occurred in 1867 in Paris, he was paid a tribute with a huge art exhibition of his works.
According to Baudelaire, Ingres was “the only one in France who could indeed paint portraits”. And, as a matter of fact, portraits are what helped Ingres the most showing his real talent as an artist. Ingres was not used to imitating reality, he transposed mental images, full of psychological inferences, in his paintings, simplifying the drawing insomuch as it appears, even two-dimensionally.
At the beginning of his career, Ingres portrayed the whole Rivière famile in three superb paintings. The most famous of them is the portrait of the young Caroline Rivière, Sabine and Philibert’s daughter, painted in 1805.
Caroline was 13 years old and she died that very year, few months after the fulfillment of the work. She’s portrayed in three-quarter position and set under an arch frame, just like a medieval Saint. The outlines are really sharp and the colour is spread in flat fields. Both these things help give the young female figure a fluid, but flat, and two-dimensional look.
At first, this painting baffles one’s perception. But if we analyze it thoroughly, we can figure out that Mlle. Rivière’s anatomy is completely wrong because the artist wanted to achieve an abstract beauty ideal. The rounded face is sustained by a too thin neck, her shoulders are too narrow and they outline an unnatural arch, her breast is too high-placed and her bust is too short.
The bright white clothes she’s wearing create a purity typical of adolescence and, in the same time, they forecast that Caroline would have never known womanhood, the same of her mother’s portrait, because of her early death. Her sensuality is nascent rather than overripe. And her position is sinuous rather than lascivious, such as Sabine Rivière’s one.
The whole portrait is lavished with a dazzling light, which could have offended those 1805’s critics used to bright white dresses worn by young wealthy ladies and to a darker palette for the backgrounds of the pintings, not to such a luminous landscape.
Caroline wears an empire waist dress with a bodice, highlighted by a silk ribbon, with scoop neck and a fine sheer detail that covers her breast and makes the whole dress look more chaste than Madame Rivière’s one, featuring a deep square neckline. In both portraits, sleeves are gathered but, while the mother’s ones are transparent and show sensually her skin, the daughter’s sleeves cover her shoulders and even her arms are hidden by long soft leather gloves. The white fur boa Caroline is wearing is a symbol of the wealthy condition of Rivière’s family and echoes, in its serpentine route, the mother’s sumptuous shawl, in less extravagant terms.
Madame Rivière, Ingres, Oil on canvas, cm 100 x 70, Paris, Musée du Louvre, 1804
Portrait of Juliette Récamier, François-Pascal-Simon Gérard. Oil on canvas, cm 255 x 148,, Paris, Musée Carnavalet, 1805
Portrait of Catherine Worlée, Princesse de Talleyrand-Périgord, François-Pascal-Simon Gérard, oil on canvas, private collection, 1804
Portrait of Mrs. Harrison Gray Otis, Gilbert Stuart, oil on canvas, cm 81 x 66, North Carolina, Winston-Salem, Reynolda House Museum of American Art, 1809
Madame Récamier, Jacques-Louis David, oil on canvas, cm 174 x 244, Paris, Musée du Louvre, 1800
Portrait of a woman holding a pencil and drawing a book, Robert-Jacques Lefèvre. 1808
Portrait of a young woman in white, Jacques-Louis David, oil on canvas, cm 125,5 x 95, Wahington D.C., Chester Dale Collection, National Gallery of Art, 1798
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