Ingres: 106 Masterpieces

Publisher Marketing: This Art Book with Foreword and annotated reproductions by Maria Tsaneva contains 106 selected paintings and drawings of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres was a French Neoclassical painter. Though he considered himself to be a painter of history in the tradition of Nicolas Poussin and Jacques-Louis David, by the end of his life it was Ingres's portraits, both painted and drawn, that were recognized as his greatest inheritance. A man profoundly respectful of the past, he assumed the role of a guardian of academic orthodoxy against the ascendant Romantic style represented by his nemesis Eugene Delacroix. His exemplars, he once explained, were "the great masters which flourished in that century of glorious memory when Raphael set the eternal and incontestable bounds of the sublime in art ... I am thus a conservator of good doctrine, and not an innovator." He was a bourgeois with the limitations of a bourgeois mentality but as Baudelaire remarked, his finest works 'are the product of a deeply sensuous nature'. The central contradiction of his career is that although he was held up as the guardian of classical rules and precepts, it is his personal obsessions and mannerisms that make him such a great artist. His technique as a painter was academically above reproach.