page_title: Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres
section_title: Last years (1841–1867)
hierarchical_section_title: Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres / Last years (1841–1867)
caption_attribution_description: Français&#160;: Ingres autoportrait à 78 ans galerie des Offices Florence
context_page_description: Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres 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.
context_section_description: One of the first works executed after his return to Paris was a portrait of the duc d'Orléans. After the heir to the throne was killed in a carriage accident a few months after the painting was completed in 1842, Ingres received commissions to make additional copies. He also received a commission to design seventeen stained glass windows for the chapel on the place where the accident occurred, and a commission for eight additional stained-glass designs for Orléans chapel in Dreux. He became a professor at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. He took his students frequently to the Louvre to the see the classical and Renaissance art, instructing them to look straight ahead and to avoid the works of Rubens, which he believed deviated too far from the true values of art.
  The Revolution of 1848, which overthrew Louis Philippe and created the French Second Republic, had little effect on his work or his ideas. He declared that the revolutionaries were "cannibals who called themselves French", but during the Revolution completed his Venus Anadyomene, which he had started as an academic study in 1808. It represented Venus, rising from the sea which had given birth to her, surrounded by cherubs.  He welcomed the patronage of the new government of Louis-Napoleon, who in 1852 became Emperor Napoleon III.   
  In 1843 Ingres began the decorations of the great hall in the Château de Dampierre with two large murals, the Golden Age and the Iron Age, illustrating the origins of art.  He made more than five hundred preparatory drawings, and worked on the enormous project for six years. In an attempt to imitate the effect of Renaissance frescos, he chose to paint the murals in oil on plaster, which created technical difficulties. Work on the Iron Age never progressed beyond the architectural background painted by an assistant. Meanwhile, the growing crowd of nudes in the Golden Age discomfited Ingres's patron, the Duc de Luynes, and Ingres suspended work on the mural in 1847. Ingres was devastated by the loss of his wife, who died on 27 July 1849, and he was finally unable to complete the work. In July 1851, he announced a gift of his artwork to his native city of Montauban, and in October he resigned as professor at the École des Beaux-Arts.
  However, in 1852, Ingres, then seventy-one years of age, married forty-three-year-old Delphine Ramel, a relative of his friend Marcotte d'Argenteuil. Ingres was rejuvenated, and in the decade that followed he completed several significant works, including the portrait of Princesse Albert de Broglie, née Joséphine-Eléonore-Marie-Pauline de Galard de Brassac de Béarn. In 1853 he began the Apotheosis of Napoleon I, for the ceiling of a hall in the Hôtel de Ville, Paris. (It was destroyed in May 1871 when the Paris Commune set fire to the building.) With the help of assistants, in 1854 he completed another history painting, Joan of Arc at the Coronation of Charles VII. A retrospective of his works was featured at the Paris Universal Exposition of 1855, and in the same year Napoleon III named him a Grand Officer of the Légion d'honneur. In 1862 he was awarded the title of Senator, and made a member of the Imperial Council on Public Instruction. Three of his works were shown in the London International Exhibition, and his reputation as a major French painter was confirmed once more.
  He continued to rework and refine his classic themes. In 1856 Ingres completed The Source (The Spring), a painting begun in 1820 and closely related to his Venus Anadyoméne. He painted two versions of Louis XIV and Molière (1857 and 1860), and produced variant copies of several of his earlier compositions. These included religious works in which the figure of the Virgin from The Vow of Louis XIII was reprised: The Virgin of the Adoption of 1858 (painted for Mademoiselle Roland-Gosselin) was followed by The Virgin Crowned (painted for Madame la Baronne de Larinthie) and The Virgin with Child. In 1859 he produced new versions of The Virgin of the Host, and in 1862 he completed Christ and the Doctors, a work commissioned many years bef
caption: Self-Portrait at Seventy-Eight (1858), Uffizi Gallery, Florence
exif: {}