Art Of The Day Weekly

#408 - from 26 November 2015 to 2 December 2015

Ingres, a certain image of women

MADRID – While some would like us to believe that the female body is a vision from hell, it has always been painters’ main source of inspiration. Ingres would surely agree wit us, he who throughout his life (1780-1867) never ceased with surgical precision to draw it whether dressed or nude. His Grande Odalisque, his Bain turc have a special place in the Western imagination of the ideal beauty. To reach this end the artist did not hesitate to twist perspectives, lengthen arms and legs as the Mannerist artists had done three centuries before. Madrid hosts and this is a big event, for indeed, there isn’t one of his works in the Spanish public collections, even though the duke of Alba was also a close friend of his in Rome. Though Ingres haunted Delacroix, and even prevented him from being elected to the Academy of fine Arts, he excelled in many other genres, such as in portraits of high society –that of Countess d’Haussonville on loan from the Frick Collection in New York, as well as in mythological scenes, in sacred painting, in "troubadour" historical paintings, giving him an original position, somewhere between Neo-classicism, Romanticism and Realist painting.
Ingres at the Museo del Prado, from 24 November 2015 to 27 March 2016.

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