Masters in Art, Part 79, Volume 7, July, 1906: Ingres A Series of Illustrated Monographs — Themes and Context

Plate Descriptions as Critical Miniatures

The descriptions of the ten plates, though ostensibly explanatory, carry a critical weight that shapes the reader’s encounter with Ingres’s work. The entry for Œdipus and the Sphinx (Plate I) contrasts Ingres’s treatment with David’s, noting that Ingres’s hero is “endowed with the beauty of a Greek athlete rather than a god,” and that his “academic exactitude” made him appear “a revolutionary” to contemporaries. This tension—between classical rigor and perceived innovation—recurs throughout the volume. The description of Madame de Senonnes (Plate II) goes further, quoting M. Louis Gonse’s effusive praise and recounting the painting’s later neglect: sold for 120 francs after being relegated to an attic. Such details embed the works in a social and biographical context, turning each plate into a narrative node.

Recurring Motifs: Mirrors, Hands, and the Gaze

Across the excerpts, certain visual details recur with notable frequency. In the portrait of Madame de Senonnes, the mirror reflecting the back of the head is singled out as “a favorite device of the Primitives.” The description lingers on her hands—“beautiful, large, plump hands loaded with rings”—and the sinuous lines of her body. Similarly, the Œdipus plate emphasizes the hero’s pose: “one foot placed upon a rock and his elbow resting on his knee,” a posture of intense concentration. These repeated motifs—mirrors, hands, the directed gaze—suggest that the volume’s authors were attuned to Ingres’s signature strategies for composing psychological depth within a classical framework. The mirror, in particular, becomes a structural device that connects the painted surface to the viewer’s space.

Movement Between Biography and Art Criticism

The volume’s organization creates a deliberate oscillation between the life and the work. The biographical section (“The Life of Ingres”) precedes the critical essays (“The Art of Ingres,” “Criticisms by Blanc, Lapauze, Muther”), which in turn lead to the plate descriptions. This sequence implies that understanding Ingres’s biography is a prerequisite for grasping his artistic choices. Yet the plate descriptions often break this chronology, as when the Madame de Senonnes entry inserts a romantic rumor about Ingres’s “tender feeling” for the model, or when the Œdipus description references his Roman sojourn. The movement is not linear but recursive: each section revisits and recontextualizes information, building a composite portrait that resists simple cause-and-effect explanations.

The Role of the Commentators: Three Voices, One Subject

The inclusion of three commentators—Blanc, Lapauze, and Muther—introduces a polyphonic structure rare in monographs of this period. Blanc, a French art historian, likely emphasizes Ingres’s place in the classical tradition; Lapauze, a curator, may focus on the works’ provenance and exhibition history; Muther, a German critic, could offer a broader European perspective. The excerpts hint at this diversity: Muther is described as viewing Ingres as “the connecting link between the great art of the first half and the familiar art which rules over the second half of the nineteenth century.” This tripartite commentary allows the volume to present Ingres not as a monolithic figure but as a subject of ongoing debate, with each critic foregrounding different aspects of his practice—line, color, historical influence.

Readers approaching this monograph will find that its value lies less in a unified thesis than in the juxtaposition of materials: the plates, the biographical data, and the critical assessments. The volume rewards attention to how each section reframes the others, and to the recurring details—mirrors, hands, the tension between classicism and innovation—that the commentators return to across different contexts. Treat the plate descriptions not as mere captions but as arguments in their own right, and the bibliography as a guide to further voices in the conversation about Ingres’s legacy.