Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres Giclée Fine Art Prints 4 of 7

The young Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres (1780-1867) learnt drawing very early under his father, who was a painter and sculptor. In 1791 he entered the Royal Academy in Toulouse.

At the age of seventeen he went to Paris, where he was accepted into the studio of Jacques Louis David. In 1801 he won the Prix de Rome and received his first commissions. Five years later, he went to the Eternal City, inspired by Raphael's frescoes in the Vatican looms, and created nude bodies and portraits whose anatomical deformities now established the primacy of drawing. His painting "Jupiter and Thetis" (1811) was sent to Paris and provoked ridicule. The painter suffered from the misunderstanding of his works. He was finally commissioned to paint the canvas "The Vow of Louis XIII" - the King praying, prostrate before the Madonna and Child. At the Salon of 1824, the public greeted this work with rapture, which bears the imprint of Raphael's memory of the Madonnas and stands as a pinnacle of classical art.

Ingres returned to Paris and opened a studio - he created "The Apotheosis of Homer" for a ceiling in the Louvre - and in 1832 he returned to portraiture with a masterpiece, "Louis-François Bertin". The imperious and imposing image of this patron of the press (founder of the Journal des débats) grew into a symbol of the rising liberal bourgeoisie. In 1834 Ingres accepted the post of director of the Villa Medici in Rome and remained there for seven years.

Back in Paris, he worked on large-scale wall panels for the château at Dampierre and for the rooms of the Hôtel de Ville, where he chose to present the "The Apotheosis of Napoleon I". He put all his imagination into a work of nude bodies, "The Turkish Bath", a masterpiece of his last years.