Ingres by Alexander Joseph Finberg — Read

This large and famous picture was commissioned to fill the ceiling of one of the galleries of the Louvre. It is signed "Ingres pingbat, anno 1827." It cost the master more research and trouble than any of his other works. This is proved by the number of painted studies, some of them superior to the finished picture itself, and the repeated references to it in his letters and note-books. Homer is being crowned by Victory, and the two beautiful female figures seated at his feet represent the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey". Around Homer are the painters, sculptors, and musicians whom the artist wished to glorify. "To his great regret," he said he felt compelled to exclude Goethe, because he found too many "faults" in his writings. But Shakespeare and Pope were admitted. In his last version of this subject, made in 1865, Shakespeare was also finally expelled.

To this period of Ingres' first sojourn in Rome (from the end of 1806 to 1820) belong some of the artist's finest and most personal works. We must give the first place to his portraits. The delicious portrait of Madame Aymon, known as "La Belle Zelie" (now in the Museum of Rouen), was immediately followed by what is on all hands regarded as his most beautiful work of this kind. This is the "Madame Devaucay," of the Museum of Chantilly. It is an admirable example of Ingres' wonderful power of concentration and absorption in the thing seen. Disdaining the help of accessories, he draws all his inspiration from the face and figure of his model. He seizes the personality of his sitter with so much completeness and such perfect sympathy and understanding, and places it on the canvas with so much authority and power, that the portrait of the individual takes on all the scope of a permanent and absolute type. The portrait of "Madame de Senonnes" (now in the Museum of Nantes), which was painted about 1810, has the same intensity of spirit as the "Madame Devaucay," and the same exquisite perfection of modelling and design. It is also marked by greater ease and freedom of handling, a sign of the young master's growing confidence in his own genius. It is generally regarded as Ingres' masterpiece of feminine portraiture.