Patrick Bade
Delacroix and Ingres
Patrick Bade - Delacroix and Ingres
- Great, thank you so much. Well, on the screen you can see two bad-tempered irascible old men who hated one another’s guts. There’s Ingres on the left, Delacroix on the right. Delacroix delivered one of the all-time great putdowns about the art of Ingres. He said it was the complete expression of an incomplete intelligence. And Ingres would be splattering with rage if anybody mentioned the name of Delacroix in front of him. One occasion in an exhibition, he was seen rushing ‘round, opening all the windows. And somebody said, “What are you doing?” And he said, “I’m letting out the smell of brimstone that comes from the paintings of Delacroix.” So these two men were seen as the polar opposites of French art of the first half of the 19th century. Ingres saw himself and his followers saw him as the upholder of the classical tradition. And Delacroix was the radical romantic. You also have that dichotomy, which has been in European painting since the Renaissance between linear and painterly. What Vasari in the 16th century called disegno and colore, distinguishing between the characteristics of the Florentine School of Painting and the Venetian School of Painting. Linear means that the art is principally, it’s all about contours, all about line. And Ingres is certainly a great master of expressive line, both in his drawings and his paintings. Colore for Vasari meant not just colour. It meant the actual quality of the paint. The paint should be sensuous. There should be a gorgeous painterly surface to the painting. Now, Ingres always said, “Well, if a painting is well-enough drawn, it’s well-enough painted.” So he put great emphasis on line.
His followers claimed that Delacroix couldn’t draw, and Delacroix’s followers claimed that Ingres painted en gris, in grey. Both untrue, I would say quite untrue. Ingres can be the most exquisite and extraordinary colorist when he wants to be. And Delacroix in his very different way was also a masterly draughtsman. Here they are somewhat earlier, a little bit earlier in life, although Ingres already looking very pompous, Mr. Establishment, you can see that he’s very prominently displaying the rosette of the Legion d'honneur on his jacket. Well, there was a time when they were both young, even Ingres was a sort of young blade, as you can see here on the left-hand side. And those generalisations that I’ve just made with hindsight, you can see it’s not as simple as that. It’s much, much more complicated. They both belong to the Romantic era. They both have some of the characteristics of the Romantic movement with the capital R. So it’s again, it’s Ingres here on the left, Delacroix on the right, very perhaps showing himself as Hamlet or possibly as Ravenswood in “The Bride of Lammermoore” of Walter Scott. In any case, he’s playing some kind of role in this painting. So you can see Ingres looking very mean and moody bit rockstar with the romantic curly, unruly hair. So typical of the period. So he was born in Montauban in the southwest of France in 1780. In his initially had his first education as an artist, very early age locally. And then he came up to Paris and he entered the studio of David like so many other artists, which you’ve seen already. There it is on the left-hand side.
And he was a star pupil of David. In the year 1800, he won the annual Prix de Torse, the torso prize with this picture on the right-hand side. As we shall see, he’s a great master of the nude, but the female nude, the male nude is really of not much interest to him. And he very, very rarely depicted male nudes. And then the following year, 1801, he won the Prix de Rome, the Rome prize, which entitled him to five years of study in Rome. But he actually didn’t take it up until 1806. This is a very curious work in some ways not very characteristic, but it was 'cause it wasn’t a subject that he chose. With the Prix de Rome there was always a set subject and everybody entering for the competition had to paint the same subject. And this is again, this is a very exceptional picture in his career with its predominance of male nudity and a curious homoeroticism, which certainly never shows itself in his work after this. There was a very brilliant book that came out in 1995 by an American academic called Carol Ockman, title was “Ingres’s Eroticized Bodies”. And she does a very interesting Freudian analysis of this picture. The subject is that the ambassadors of Agamemnon, Agamemnon in the tent of Achilles. So it’s a subject from Homer, from the Trojan Wars. And Achilles was throwing a strop and refusing to fight and the ambassadors of Agamemnon come to persuade him to fight unsuccessfully actually. In the background on the left-hand side, you can see his mistress, a slave called Briseis, and Carol Ockman she points out the rather strange placing of her what must be her left hand looking in extraordinarily like a sort of erect phallus halfway down her body.
And she concentrates on getting in closer, really strange, I’m sure this is unconscious on Ingres’s part. But there’s a rather strange dialogue, I would say, going on between Achilles’ index figure and this very feminised body of one of the ambassadors in the right-hand side of this detail. So as I said, Ingres saw himself as the continuer of the classic tradition and the follower of the Renaissance artist Raphael. But in fact, the influences on him are broader than that. And particularly at this early phase of his career, there’s a certain kind of primitivism, these two big influences this early stage were the English sculptor, and illustrator Flaxman, who actually brought out a set of illustrations to Homer. You see one of them at the top here. And Flaxman and Ingres both of course looking at ancient Greek vases. And the kind of torse that you see in this Ingres it’s Venus wounded by Diomedes on the right-hand side where you’ve got the torsos facing the viewer but you have the heads in profile. And we already have one of the most controversial and interesting aspects of Ingres’ art, his incredible distortions of the female anatomy. Venus seems to have no bones in her body. I always think that Ingres’ nude women looked a bit like they’ve been bought from a sex shop and blown up with a bicycle pump. They’re completely sort of stretchy, nothing solid about them. The other thing that he was certainly looking at, which is not classical at all, he was looking at 15th century Flemish art, which at the time they were described as primitives, not a term that’s used anymore. But this van Dyck, van Eyck rather, I don’t think he would have known this particular picture, but he certainly knew lots of Flemish paintings and other paintings by van Eyck.
This is his portrait of Napoleon as first consul. So this is painted around just after 1800, and you have that sharpness of detail that you get in Flemish painting and an incredible jewel-like intensity of colour. And he’s using a technique I think similar to the old Flemish artist of glazes. Glazes is superimposing transparent layers of colours. So you get this really extraordinary intensity of colour. So after Napoleon declared himself emperor in 1804, Ingres commissioned to paint another portrait of the emperor, this time enthroned as an emperor. And he seems to have for this frontal hieratic frontal pose. And in particular the way that the frame, the throne rather behind the head frames the head very symmetrically. He seems to have taken his inspiration from van Eyck’s “Ghent altarpiece”, which was one of the works of art that was looted by Napoleon. So it was available for him to study in the Louvre, ‘cause it was in Paris at this time. These two paintings are pretty well contemporary. So it’s Napoleon as emperor on the left-hand side. And this hieratic very frontal hieratic quality is very similar to Ingres’ painting of Thetis pleading with Zeus. And once again, you’ve got this very striking odd anatomy. I mean, is that arm that is stretching up towards Zeus’s beard, is it actually attached to her body?
And you have these strange boneless fingers. As I said, he won the Prix de Rome in 1801, but he didn’t set off for Roman until 1806. And he painted his first notable group of portraits in this gap between leaving Paris and going to Rome, three portraits of the same family, Monsieur and Madame Riviere and their daughter. Here is Monsieur on the left-hand side, madame on the right-hand side. These are marvellous, marvellous portraits that they have this characteristic that the best portraits have of being in a certain way quite abstract in the design. Particularly if you note the ovoid shape of Madame Riviere and how within that shape every line in that picture of her shawl, of her body, of her arm, that they all echo the curves of the ovoid shape of the overall picture. Here is Mademoiselle Riviere, the colour is so beautiful. This is a painting in the Louvre, this wonderful sharp mustard yellow that he really loves and uses it often in a very effective combination with bluey greens. It’s a ravishing portrait of obviously a very beautiful young girl. But again, what to say about the anatomy, the strange boneless shoulders. Here we have details of Miss Riviere. Note there’s always a danger of an artist who has such a licked surface as this, where you hardly see any trace of brushwork. It’s all smooth. The result of that can be very dull, it can be boring and lifeless, but I don’t feel that about Ingres. There’s a sort of crispness as I said, a sort of clarity, a jewel-like clarity, sort of sparkle to his work. We see Madame Riviere here, her face and her daughter.
Of course, Madame Riviere doesn’t look old enough to be the mother of this young woman. Of course, Ingres never, almost never… There’s one exception I’ll come to shortly. He never allows himself to observe or record any blemishes, everything is affected. Top right is a detail of the still life on a table next to Monsieur Riviere. And in that still life there is a secret. And the secret is a print of Raphael’s “Madonna della Seggiola” the “Madonna of the Seat”. Ingres later said that he first saw a reproduction of this picture when he was 11 years old in the academy at Toulouse and he fell in love with it, and it became a lifelong obsession. And there are many, many references to it. There’s even a version of it woven… Wonder if I can go back for a minute to the Napoleon, you can’t really see it here, but in one of the circular shapes on the carpet, there is a outline of the composition of the “Madonna della Seggiola”. And so, there you see the “Madonna della Seggiola” on the left-hand side. And it was a key influence on Ingres, because again, you’ve got, it’s in some ways very naturalistic that Raphael has depicted the Virgin as a young mother embracing her child. So it’s clearly in some ways observed from life. But again, you’ve got this strange dichotomy between the naturalism and an abstract sense of design. So again, within the circular shape of “Madonna della Seggiola” once again, all the elements are repeating or creating circular shapes. It’s almost like a piece of music with phrases answering one another.
And again, I put in Madame Riviere with the same device, but in this case, in an ovoid shape rather than a circular one. Now, as I said, Ingres, it was an obsession that he had with the “Madonna della Seggiola” had nothing to do with Christianity, nothing to do with the religion, quite the country, it’s actually an erotic obsession that he has with this image. He painted several pictures of Raphael who was his great hero with his mistress. She was the baker’s daughter La Fornarina that Vasari tells us about. And it’s very obvious when you compare the two that Raphael’s mistress in this painting is closely based on Raphael’s “Madonna della Seggiola” and Ingres most erotic paintings like the “La Grande Odalisque” and “La Baigneuse Valpincon”, I’m sure in his consciously or unconsciously, these erotic nudes are his fantasy of Raphael’s Madonna with no clothes. You can see it very closely if you compare the head and the headdress of the “La Grande Odalisque” on the left-hand side with the “Madonna della Seggiola” Here is “La Grande Odalisque” which is of course one of the star paintings in the Louvre. This was commissioned by the Napoleonic Queen of Naples. Her name was Caroline Murat. She was married to one of the great Napoleonic generals, General Murat, who was briefly made King of Naples by Napoleon. So this painting was commissioned in 1813 by the Queen as a present for her husband. It’s rather strange to us.
I think it would be a bit like somebody, a woman giving her husband a sexy calendar for his birthday present. The painting was shown at the Salon of 1814. Much discussed and quite scandalous. A rumour was circulated that the Queen of Naples had posed for this picture herself. Ingres indigently refuted this. He said, “No, no, no, no.” It was actually painted from a 13-year-old girl that he found in Rome. Well, I’m not sure I believe that either, but it is kind of irrelevant, because well, I don’t think any 13-year-old girl would ever look like this, but actually what woman would look like this? Again, there are quite extraordinary anatomical distortions. At the time it was exhibited, a doctor published a letter criticising the picture, ‘cause he said there were too many vertebrae in the back. Well, I would say that that was the least of her anatomical problems. And you’ve got these differently placed shoulders. Once again, the further leg are we sure that that leg is even attached to the body. But it is a ravishing painting and not least, because of its colour. So it is absolute nonsense to say that Ingres painted in grey, he didn’t. And once again, you’ve got this really singing combination of peacock blue and this sharp mustard yellow that you have in the bottom left-hand corner. And this is I think the even more exquisite Baigneuse, “The Valpincon” who seems to be an Odalisque.
Again, both these pictures are sort of fantasies of harems, this was a great male fantasy in Europe in the 18th and 19th century, mainly based on accounts of the wife of an English diplomat called Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who in the early 18th century, her husband was an ambassador in Constantinople and she was allowed access to the Sultan’s harem. And she wrote these very colourful descriptions of these beautiful naked women lulling around in the harem that fired the imagination for European artists well into the 19th century. So this is going to a very exceptional picture, because it’s obviously a male nude, it’s “Oedipus and the Sphinx”, it is very typical of Ingres that he brings the figures right up to the foreground of the picture and that they’re seen in a very linear way in profile this could be a figure again of a Greek vase. But I think he’s also looking back to Poussin in the 17th century, particularly the frightened figure you see gesturing in the background is very similar to this gesturing figure from the background of a painting by Poussin that you see on the left. So 1806, he finally gets to Rome and he stays there until 1824. So quite for quite a big chunk of his career.
The painting you see on the right-hand side, the circular one is actually a tiny painting and it’s one of a pair. And the pair are the only landscape paintings that are known by Ingres and I regret that very much, 'cause it’s such a limpid exquisite little picture it seems to in its sort of silvery light, its luminosity, it seems to anticipate the work of Corot. So I feel that Ingres could have been a great landscape painter if he’d been interested, but he obviously wasn’t. And well, another unusual picture, obviously setting down an experience in Rome that must have impressed him. Got the Pope here enthroned. This would have been Pope Pius VII enthroned. In the Sistine Chapel, we see the Michelangelo’s “Last Judgement ” in the background. Now the most notable paintings to come out of his first years in Rome are a series of male portraits. Later after he returns to Paris, he confines himself almost exclusively to painting female portraits. But in these years in Italy, he was commissioned to paint portraits by French officials, Napoleonic officials were actually ruling Italy during Napoleonic period. This is Monsieur Marcotte on the right-hand side. And you from this pose, which is seems to be very relaxed, very natural, but is very satisfying from a pictorial formal point of view. I think it, this is something again that he’s borrowed from Raphael, this is Raphael’s “Portrait of Agnolo Doni” dating from the beginning of the 16th century on the left-hand side. And these are wonderful, 'cause he’s not alone in the fact that he always, there’s a big difference between his male portraits and his female portraits. And the male portraits on the whole are much more sharply characterised.
He’s more interested in them as individuals where it’s quite obvious with a lot of the female portraits that he’s just actually basically lusting after the subject and idealising subject as well. So all these pictures have wonderful colour. I’d like to stress that. Again, you’ve got this, here you’ve got a very, very pale lemon yellow that contrasting with the navy blue of the coat and the red, which doesn’t actually come across strong enough really in this, in reality the red is a more singing more effective red. This is another Napoleonic official Monsieur Granet. I’d like you to note that the hairstyles that very different of course from 18th century powdered wigs, this tousled, untidy hair, which is so characteristic of the Romantic period, this is the fashionable look of the period. This is Mr. Cordier, and again, he enjoys that little patch of red. It’s really quite important, I think, to the colour harmony of the picture. And this is Monsiere Moltedo on the right-hand side. He’s in the Met in New York and Baron de Norvins on the left, who was the chief of police in Rome in the Napoleonic period. And he looks to me like a very nasty piece of work. I always identify him with a Scarpia the evil Roman chief of police in the opera “Tosca”. This is how I imagine Scarpia looking. I mean, quite a handsome man, but ooh, steely and ruthless. So this painting, these two paintings actually both belong to Degas. And when Degas died in 1917, at the height of the First World War, there was a sale in Paris.
Of course, the Germans couldn’t bid in that sale. And the Americans weren’t present, 'cause the war was going on and it was submarine warfare. So in fact the National Gallery in London bought a number of paintings from Degas’ collection, including these two. And they’re usually hanging in the same room in the National Gallery. And when I take people around the National Gallery, I like to do a compare and contrast between the two. It’s on the right-hand it’s a “Baron Schwiter” by Delacroix. And on the left “Baron de Norvins” by Ingres. They’re both wonderful paintings. But I feel that actually the Ingres is much more sharply characterised. There’s something a bit bland about the characterization of Baron Schwiter. Both of them have the untidy romantic hair. But what’s interesting, you can see it actually in this image to some certain extent, is that Ingres has repainted the hair and the area around it. You can see, I think even here, you can see a disturbance in the paint surface and you can certainly see it very clearly in reality. That’s unusual because Ingres, all his paintings were completely planned in drawings. So the drawings would then be squared up and then the contours are transferred to the canvas. And the painting in a certain sense is painting by numbers, ‘cause you are just filling the pre-ordained contours. So Ingres very, very, you very rarely see what you call pentimento, that the artist has changed his mind while working. My theory about this is that he initially painted the hair much more smooth and tidy and probably Baron Norvins said, “No, no, no, no, I want the fashionable windswept look,” and Ingres had to redo it.
Now the other thing, which is very interesting to compare is the paint surface of these two pictures. Obviously, you get this better if you go to the National Gallery and you stand in front of the two pictures. Oh, here’s the hair. And I think probably you can see on the left-hand side you can see that the Ingres has made alterations. And the other thing I love to compare is the cravats. This is the great age of the elaborate cravat. In England, Beau Brummell was very famous for his incredibly elaborately-tied cravats. And there’s an account of somebody visiting him in the early afternoon at the point where he was about to emerge into the world. And as he entered, there was a huge pile of soiled cravats on the floor. And so, this visitor said to Beau Brummell’s manservant, “What are those?” And the manservant said, “Oh those, sir, those are today’s failures.” So, it would take hours and hours to tie a cravat like this. Cravats are quite difficult to paint. And the way these two cravats are done, there are two ways, there are two approaches to painting an elaborate cravat like this, one is to really delineate it, this is the linear approach. I couldn’t give you a better explanation really of the difference between a linear approach and a painterly approach. But then showing you these two cravats. In reality, the Delacroix doesn’t really come across here in this image on the screen. It’s really impasto-ed, it’s thick, thick paint, but still quite juicy. And he’s really, troweled it onto the surface. Whereas the surface of the Ingres is almost completely smooth. Two female portraits from this period, as I said in his Napoleonic period, he’s mainly concentrating on male portraits.
But here are two portraits from this period. One Mademoiselle Duvaucey. She was the mistress of the French ambassador in Rome. A very lovely young woman as you can see, but also with some anatomical oddities. If you notice how the shoulder on the right-hand side, very typically for Ingres is made to align with the curve of the back of the chair that she’s sitting in. So I’d say, almost musical rather than a naturalistic use of lime. Madame de Tournon on the left-hand side, she’s unique in that I think this is the only portrait of a woman by Ingres of an elderly woman that he’s otherwise only really he’s exclusively interested in women who he fancied. But what a character. Oh, I’d love to have tea with her. I wish again, he’d done a few more portraits of this type. So while in Rome he’s doing small historical pictures, but this is a new type of history painting. This is not history painting as it would’ve been understood by say it’s a Joshua Reynolds in 18th Centuries. These are a little anecdotal genre pictures that are set in historical periods. The one on the right-hand side is very famous anecdote about Henry of Navarre, Henry IV, who was a very earthy character. And the Spanish ambassador arrived one day and saw the king on the floor playing piggyback with his children. He was terribly shocked at this. This contrast, here’s the same subject actually by the English artist Bonnington, but in a much more sort of loose painterly style. I think I’m going to skip some of these, 'cause I’ve got so much to cover. So Napoleon falls, Italy regains, well not exactly its independence, but its freedom from France in 1815 and Ingres then he decided to stay in Italy and he needs to earn a living. And the tourists are now flooding back to Italy particularly from northern Europe.
So I think it’s actually a Polish family on the right-hand side. I love, he did a lot of these drawings. I think this was a pot boiler for him. This was a nice little earner to make drawings of foreign tourists in Italy. And I particularly love this one of an English aristocrat called the Sir Fleetwood Broughton. And he’s such an English type. I mean, he could be a member of the present government actually. I mean, or may not so much the present government. I would say he’s more of the David Cameron, George Osborne period. That kind of English upper-class sense or slightly factual sense or superiority. I mean, Ingres’s got it absolutely in a nutshell. Here, once again, we have a rare maybe actually unique example of Ingres and Delacroix portraying the same person and it’s the great violin virtuoso Niccolo Paganini, and they’re both wonderful portraits. Ingres of course was himself a very gifted amateur violinist. So in France, if you want to say somebody has a hobby, a very serious hobby, they call it the violon d'Ingres the Ingres’ violin, ‘cause he was such a passionate violin player. So I’m sure this tells you really what he looked like and it’s a very accurate and a very brilliant drawing. And in this case, I have to say, I would go for this wonderful little oil sketch of Paganini by Delacroix which gives you this sense of devilish virtuosity. And all these, I remember when I was a child being told by my aunt stories about how Paganini sold his soul to the devil. I found it a very frightening story. I remember when I was a child that you get a sense of this sort of sinister, devilish quality of Paganini’s virtuosity from this little sketch by Ingres.
So this is a picture that Ingres anchor sent to the Salon in Paris in 1819. So this was in the same Salon as “The Raft of Medusa” by Gericault. And this is Roger rescuing Angelica. And it’s a painting that for me illustrates Ingres’ best qualities and his limitations. It’s again, a painting, if you want to give a Freudian interpretation, you certainly can. And it has been by feminist historians have done this, with the very obviously phallic rock that the limp, boneless passive Angelica is chained to. And I don’t know whether you can see at the bottom the open mouth of the dragon, some people have seen it, but read a lot of sexual symbolism into that. And the lance penetrating it and the open mouth, the dragon being the vagina dentata. The limitation I think is the complete lack of any sense of movement. It’s frozen. You don’t have a sense that Roger is flying through the air. He’s stuck there. Here’s the same subject painted by Delacroix on the left-hand side. Amazing fluency, brilliant virtuoso brushwork. full of movement, full of drama. And when you look at this cloak, do you believe that that is really flattering? No, I don’t think so. I think Ingres, actually, he laid out a cloak on the floor and he made a very careful drawing from that cloak lying on the floor. And it’s one dimensional that doesn’t fly through the air, but the nude, it’s so wonderful.
I mean, I can see that women today might not necessarily like Ingres nudes, because they’re sex toys, they’re passive, they’re completely boneless. Here again, a comparison of the female nude painted by Ingres on the left, it’s a study for Roger and Angelica. And on the right is a Delacroix free copy after a detail from the Rubens’ Marie de'Medici. So over back to Delacroix. Delacroix’ a bit younger, well sort of half a generation younger than Ingres. And this is the painting that first made his reputation when it was shown at the Salon of 1821, so he was still a very, very young man. It’s “The Barque of Dante”. And if you remember from my Gericault lecture, he was a close friend of Gericault and he’s certainly influenced by Gericault in this picture, he’s influenced by the “The Raft of Medusa”. And this was such a startling, amazing painting. And somebody actually went up to Gericault and said, “Did you paint that wonderful picture?” And Gericault apparently said, “No, I didn’t paint it, but I wish I had.” Well, two interesting details here. First of all, you can see craquelure, you can see in the dark areas around that bottom on the left-hand side, he’s been using bitumen, which was, is this tarry substance that apparently gave the paint surface a lovely quality, but bitumen gradually self-destructs. So it’s something that people began to realise soon after this. So it’s only in his earliest paintings that Delacroix uses bitumen. But the other detail, which is very, very commented on by art historians are the drops of water on the flesh.
That he seems to have learned this trick of it’s an optical illusion. In this detail blown up, you can see that, that drop of water consists of just three or four touches of paint laid on the surface side by side and you retire to a distance and you have the illusion of it being a glistening drop of water. And this is something he learned from his study of Rubens. There is a detail of Rubens from the Mary de'Medici cycle. Now 1824, there are two great battles at the Salon between Ingres and Delacroix in 1824-1827. 1820s of course is the height of Romanticism with the capital R in France and in Paris. This is shows the opening of the Salon of 1824 with the King Charles X in attendance or handing out the medals. And it’s this image is it’s not by well-known artist, but it’s interesting for the information it gives us about the Salon that you had these enormous pictures that were framed to frame floor to ceiling. And in the middle ground, in the middle, just to right of the middle, you can see Ingres’ exhibit of 1824, which was “The Vow of Louis XIII” who vowed to the Virgin, to rid France of Protestantism. And so, it’s a rather reactionary subject, I suppose. And the great the Delacroix exhibit, one of his great masterpieces is “The Massacre of Chios”, which everybody in Europe was very appalled and sort of interested really in the Greek War of Independence and the brutality of the Turks towards the Greeks. And on the island of Chios, the Turks massacred most of the population. So this is a subject, it would be like somebody exhibiting a picture at the Royal Academy this year about what’s going on in Ukraine.
So it’s a very contemporary subject and it’s a subject that people very felt very strongly about. I can’t say, I think “The Vow of Louis XIII” is one of Ingres’ more exciting paintings. Again, I think it’s a picture that probably shows his limitations as an artist, but also shows once again, his heavy debt to Raphael. He comes close to plagiarising Raphael, I would say. This is the “Sistine Madonna” or Raphael on the right-hand side. But the curious thing is Ingres was the one who was always promoting himself as the descendant of Raphael and the inheritor of Renaissance in the classical tradition. But Delacroix was very interested in all of that too. But he uses it differently. This is a painting of the 1830s by Delacroix, big painting’s in Lille of Medea who’s murdering her children in revenge against her faithless lover Jason. And so, there’s something very perverse and very odd, God, we need to consult Freud again. Why would an artist who wanted to depict infanticide go to Raphael for his inspiration, this pyramidal composition of the female figures and the two babies clearly inspired by the Raphael on the left-hand side? This image which is the absolute epitome for most Europeans in Catholic Europe, all everywhere actually, even in Britain of motherly love for children. So there’s something really perverse about taking that and turning it around into an image of infanticide. Wonderful details of this picture. It really is worth studying when you go to the louvre amazing painterly details. Famously, of course Constable’s Haywain was in the same exhibit.
And we know that Delacroix went to study it very closely, ‘cause he talks about it in his journal. And that what he seems to have learned, particularly from Constable, was the use of broken brushwork. And you see a scumbling, Constable is a great scumbler. You’ve got scumbling here where you have the paint dragged over the surface and going on in a kind of a bumpy, irregular way. So the next great confrontation between Delacroix and Ingres in the Salon of 1827 when you had these two pictures, this sensational picture by Delacroix top-left based on Lord Byron of “The Death of Sardanapalus” who’s a potentate, who’s a dictator, who’s facing defeat and he wants everything to be destroyed, everything to go down with him. Let’s hope that Putin doesn’t have the same idea. So all his wives and his horses, the two things that he values most wives and horses. And they’re all, he’s about to commit suicide and he has wants to see them all slaughtered before he dies. So it’s a very incredibly powerful dynamic full of movement and drama. And this extraordinarily dull, what can I say, picture by Ingres of “The Apotheosis of Homer”, which is about as exciting as a school photograph. And the way all the greats of western culture, men, of course, apart from the muses are all there in homage to Homer is a better image of “The Death of Sardanapalus” 1834, no, 1830, let me just go there. 1830, the French ambassador to the Dey of Algiers was so insolent and arrogant that the Dey of Algiers step down of his throne and he swatted the French ambassador in the face with a fly swat. And the French took this as an excuse to invade Algeria and that is the beginning of the French Empire in North Africa. And four years later there was a Delacroix that went accompanied a diplomatic mission across North Africa from Algiers to Morocco.
And he kept a diary of this, both a verbal diary and as you can see, a visual diary. And it made an incredible, incredible impression on him. And so, the only houses that he was welcomed into, at least to the female parts of the houses were Jewish, 'cause the Muslims would not allow Christians to any contact with their wives or their daughters. And this is a drawing that Delacroix made of a Jewish bride, remarkably similar actually of course to the etchings and paintings of Jewish brides by Rembrandt in 17th century. These in the Sephardi tradition, the brides were laden with jewels and ornaments. And he found this very attractive and very fascinating. And he attended a Jewish wedding and made detailed notes about the colour, the light, the movement and so on. The result was this picture of a North African Jewish wedding, the most famous painting inspired by his North African trip. It’s this one in the Louvre, immensely, immensely influential painting. It’s called the Women of Algiers. So once again, it’s certainly looking back to the accounts of life in a harem, this is fantasy of course, 'cause he never went into a harem, he never actually got into one. So this is probably largely based on the accounts of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu.
But oh, so much has been written about this painting and it’s had such a continuing influence on French painting right through to Picasso and Matisse, but particularly his use of colour. And the fact that can’t really see very well, even though this is actually quite a good reproduction. But his use of complimentary colours that it was when he was in Africa that he observed that 'cause of the intensity of the light that shadows are tinted by the complimentary colour, the opposite colour of the local colour. So if you stand in front of this painting in the Louvre, and you get very close, you can see that there are red touches in the shadows of the green pyjamas of the woman on the left. So Ingres, oh dear, poor all Ingres. I do love him. Actually, I think probably if I really had to choose one or the other, I’d go for Ingres, he’s one of my heroes as an artist, but definitely an artist with limitations. He did not know how to compose a multi-figured picture. This is his most ambitious picture, never finished of the Golden Age. Well, it’s really not a very comfortable looking Golden Age. It really looks like the tube or the metro or the subway in Russia. It’s very, a very crowded paradise that we’ve got here. He doesn’t really, and this is a small version of the same tablet, he just doesn’t really know how to space the figures, how to create the right kind of intervals. And you see that also here are two modeli, these are sketches for ceiling paintings. Well, Delacroix was a natural for ceiling paintings. This is his modelo on the left-hand side for his image of Apollo for the Galerie d'Apollon in the Louvre full of dynamism, full of movement and unified it through the movement.
This is Ingres modelo for a ceiling that he was commissioned to paint for the town hall of Paris. It’s a disaster, really. It’s a disaster you don’t believe for a minute that anybody’s flying, they’re sort of suspended on wires or kind of fixed to the surface. But when he’s doing what he does well, ah, these amazing later female portraits, this is Madame Marcotte. They are so sumptuous, so gorgeous. Oh, you want to lick the surface, it’s so beautiful and the wonderful harmonies of colour and the accessories or the jewels, they’re so brilliantly, amazingly painted. This is Madame d'Haussonville. As I said, he made very elaborate portraits before he ever picked up drawings before he ever picked up a paintbrush. This is “The Princesse de Broglie” in her fantastic electric blue crinoline. This dates from around 1850. It’s in the layman collection in the Metropolitan amazing, amazing picture. And this wonderful harmony again, wrote this rather cool lemony yellow of the button-backed chair. And he’s very, very alert to latest fashions, not only in costume and dress, but also in interior design. And that kind of button-backed chair was a new thing in the 19th century. Look at that, isn’t it amazing? And this famous Madame Moitessier, of course in the National Gallery with her, this is a painting of course. Over the years I’ve taken so many students to stand in front of it to discuss it.
And in some ways people say, “Oh, it looks photographic,” 'cause it has this sharp focus and smooth surface. But of course, in many ways it’s very unnatural. It’s very unphotographic, this extraordinary hand which has no bones. And the fact that of course the profile in the mirror, it’s completely at the wrong angle, it’s not naturalistic at all. Madame Baronnes de Rothschild, I think this is one of his most engaging. I mean, I always think poor Madame Moitessier, would you want to sit next to her at dinner party? I don’t think so. I don’t think she’d have much sparkling conversation. Is there anything going on between her ears at all? Whereas Baroness de Rothchild is a much more engaging, charming character. She might be fun to sit next to. This is his one great male portrait later on, Monsieur Bertin. He concentrates, as I said, almost entirely on female portraits. And he found this portrait very, very difficult, 'cause you’ve got to get the characteristic pose, that’s the thing. So he was struggling and struggling and struggling and so much so that this distinguished elderly man who’s the chevalier of legion d'honneur suddenly burst into tears. And Monsieur Bertin was really shocked. And he went into, you can see he just went into this pose, “Oh, Monsieur Ingres, calm yourself.” And that was it. Ingres said, “Oh yes, that’s the pose.” He got the pose. This, 'cause I would so love to have an Ingres drawing. But that would cost a few hundred thousand pounds I think these days.
But this is my next best from my favourite gallery in Paris, Galerie Amicorum, this is an artist called Cazes, who is actually a pupil of, a favourite pupil of Ingres. and you can see he’s more or less ripped off Ingres for the pose of this drawing on the left-hand side, which was I was able to purchase for quite a modest sum. And so, maybe I’m running out of time, so I’m afraid I haven’t really done justice to Delacroix 'cause there’s a lot more to say about Delacroix, but I’m probably going to have to finish after discussing this painting, which is in a way the culmination of Ingres’ career. He was 83 years old when he finished this picture. And with rather shaky, he signs it Ingres Pinx 83. in a rather shaky handwriting at the bottom of the picture. It’s his final great fantasy of a Oriental harem, “Le Bain Turc”. It was actually originally bought, I don’t know if it was commissioned, but it was certainly first bought by a cousin of the Emperor Napoleon, Prince Napoleon. But his wife objected to it, so he sold it to the man you see in set at the top, he’s Khalil Pasha, Khalil Bey, who was actually a Turk, very wealthy Turk diplomat who collected erotic paintings. And he owned this as well as the Courbet origin of the world. So obviously Picasso. Delacroix and Ingres are seminal influences on French art right through in the middle of the 20th century. And many artists, Seurat, Matisse, Picasso, wanted to combine the colour of Delacroix with a line of, that’s obviously Picasso on the left-hand side.
Oh, and this is where I will finish with these, because then at least I thought I’ve done a little bit of justice to the wonderful Delacroix. When you’re next in Paris, do pop into the Great Church of Saint-Sulpice on the left bank and there is a chapel just as you go in, on the right-hand side with these final great masterpieces of Delacroix, of “Jacob Wrestling With the Angel” and “Heliodorus Expelled from the Temple of Solomon”. And hugely impressive, wonderful, amazing paintings in his late style so expressive with this dynamic, very dynamic brushwork. And this detail, this will be my last image for you. I often used to test my students. I used to have these sessions and I would put details of paintings. And I’d say, who painted that? And nine times out of 10 when I put this up, somebody would say it’s Van Gogh, ‘cause Van Gogh adored Delacroix more than any other artist he absolutely revered him. And you know how Van Gogh can paint a pair of boots and they look like they could walk off on their own, because of the energy of the brushwork. And I feel like with this hat, that this hat is alive, the whole thing is teaming with energy that comes across in the brushwork and this rather hatched linear brushwork in the modelling of the forms. So let’s open up the questions.
Q&A and Comments:
It’s not easy to tell the various artists. Well, I think, do lots of compare and contrast. That’s the way to do it. Compare and contrast is the chief method of learning how to attribute a painting.
How many…? I don’t know what that is the question about. Madame Riviere you saw in 1959. I know it’s such a wonderful picture, Margaret, those three portraits.
Q: I always stop to have a look at them? Is there a reason?
A: Yes, I think there is a reason. Maybe I didn’t, I should have tried to explain it more. It’s he’s distorting for expressive reasons. His line is incredibly expressive, it’s incredibly sensuous. And so, that expressiveness, that sensuousness takes precedent over anatomical accuracy. It does look like a photograph, but in some ways, but in other ways, not at all. It’s much more than a photograph.
Q: Did models get paid?
A: Yes, they did. They were paid an absolute pittance. I’m just reading a new book at the moment. It’s just out, I really recommend it. It’s about the relationship of Man Ray and Kiki de Montparnasse, she was the most famous model in Paris in the 1920s who posed for all the artists of the Ecole de Paris. There’s a lot of detail about what it was like as a model in the 1920s. I’m sure it wasn’t in it very different in the 19th century. You could earn a living as a model, but it was a pittance. And of course, you were expected to have sex with the artist if you wanted it. So in Delacroix’s diaries which are pretty racy and pretty sharp, he put crosses in the margin of the diary and the number of times he had sex with a model that day. And then he would sort of say at the end of the entry, unfortunately I used up most of my energy having sex with a model instead of painting today.
Ron is recommending The Frick video on Ingres’ “Portrait of the Comtesse d'Haussonville” that sounds a good thing to watch. Yes, well, I’m sure that Ingres’ anatomical distortions are how conscious they are. I mean, whether he would’ve been able to explain what he was doing, that’s another matter. But it’s not due to insufficient technique. His technique is the tops as far as drawing is concerned.
Oh, you’ve got a link now to that little talk about the Madame d'Haussonville. No, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with his eyes. And I never believed those theories. There’s that book “The World Through Blunted Sight”, which is trying to explain why that El Greco or whatever, or Monet that painted the way they did, because of trouble with their eyesight. I totally discount those theories. I don’t believe them for a second.
Ron recommending Chris Riopelle’s UK National Gallery video on Delacroix. Thank you, Nikki.
You had an art teacher who hated, but well that’s their problem, I would say. Why would he hate them? Well, that’s his problem, I’m not even going to speculate. He’s missing out, that’s all I’ll say. Thank you, nice comments.
Harem women don’t look Middle Eastern. Yeah, you’re probably right. Although, of course a lot of women in Harem’s were circassian women. There were European women in the Turkish harems. Can’t see why Van Gogh, but not the spear. No, it’s the dynamic brushwork, which is very like Van Gogh, which influenced Van Gogh, Van Gogh, very much.
In some ways Delacroix, these things, Father of Impressionism, they’re always a bit dubious, those sort of things. But it was particularly his use of, he had a very big influence on post-impressionism, of course, probably bigger on post-impressionism, on Seurat, he had a very big influence.
Q: And on, as I said already on Van Gogh, that the impressionist certainly were interested in his fluid and dynamic brushwork. To what extent was this sexual symbolism?
A: I don’t think it was conscious. I think it’s unconscious all that sexual stuff in Ingres. The Delacroix journals are extremely readable. I recommend them there. He wasn’t a nice man. He’s quite sharp and acerbic, but they’re certainly very readable.
Influence on Gerome. Only, not stylistically. Oh, or maybe you were talking about Ingres’s influence on Gerome. Yes, limited, I think, I mean, of course in the subject matter, Gerome did lots of harem pictures, but then if Gerome does completely lacks Ingres’ expressive quality of lime, I would say.
Well, that’s it for today and then onto Impressionism next time. Thank you very, very much. Bye-bye.