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 Zélie” (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 Devauçay,” 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 Sénonnes” (now in the Museum of Nantes), which was painted about 1810, has the same intensity of spirit as the “Madame Devauçay,” 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.

The well-known “Œdipus and the Sphinx” was painted in 1808, while the artist was still a pensioner of the School of Rome. It is hard for us to understand the horror and dislike which this picture provoked among the leading spirits of the school of David. What seems to us a typical example of classic art struck the official representatives of Classicism as the work of a revolutionary. In his report on this picture, M. Lethière, the director of the School of Rome, regrets that M. Ingres, in spite of his talent, has failed to grasp the secret of the “grand and noble style of the great masters of the Roman school.” To appreciate the originality and daring of this work, we must compare the figure of Œdipus with that of the Roman heroes in David’s “Rape of the Sabines.” David’s figures are all cast in the same mould. All the particularities of the individual model are ruthlessly eliminated. When we turn from the vague and empty generalisations of David, Regnault, Gérard and Girodet, and look at the narrow forehead, the pugnacious upper lip, the prominent cheek-bones, the deep-sunk eye and the bushy eyebrows of Ingres’ figure, we may begin to understand that the gulf which yawns between the two kinds of Idealism—the abstract idealism of the Davidian school and the concrete idealism of Ingres—is quite as wide and impassable as that which separates them both from Romanticism and Naturalism.

PLATE V.—M. BERTIN
(In the Louvre)

This portrait represents the famous “Bertin ainé, the director of the Journal des Débats.” It is signed “J. Ingres, pinxit 1832,” and was exhibited at the Salon of 1833.

The “Œdipus” was followed, in 1808, by the “Seated Bather” (now in the Louvre); in 1811, by “Jupiter and Thétis” (now at the Museum of Aix), a curiously Flaxman-like design; in 1812, by the “Dream of Ossian” (now at Montauban); and in 1814, by a scene of real life, “The Pope officiating among the Cardinals in the Sistine Chapel” (now in the Louvre). In this marvellous picture the artist has for once avoided the painful task of invention which he habitually imposed upon himself. He abandoned himself completely to the imperious suggestion of what was actually before his eyes. The truth, life, and richness of colour and tone of this little picture have led some of his recent admirers to speak of it as the most complete and perfectly balanced of all the artist’s works.

The “Grande Odalisque,” exhibited at the Salon of 1819, but painted in 1814, brought to a close for the time the admirable series of nude female figures which the artist had begun during his first years in Rome. His wonderful sketches of the “Venus Anadyomene” and the “Source” had already been painted, but the canvases remained unfinished in his studio, the first till 1848, the second till 1858.

His love of female beauty reveals itself again in the principal figure of the picture he sent to the Salon in 1819. This was the “Roger delivering Angelica,” a scene borrowed from the tenth song of Ariosto’s “Roland Furieux.” The picture is now in the Louvre. The young knight, mounted on a hippogriff, pierces with his lance a marine monster who was about to devour the beautiful young woman who is chained to the rocks. The figure of the young knight, his curious steed, and the strange monster which is being killed, provoked the anger and ridicule of the Academic party. In its quaint details the influence of Perugino and of the earlier Florentine and Tuscan painters was clearly noticeable. This was one of the first signs in nineteenth-century art of the Gothic revival and of that stream of tendency which came afterwards to be described as pre-Raphaelitism. The epithet “Gothic” was freely used as a term of reproach against Ingres’ picture. But the lovely figure of Angelica was a distinct creation of the painter’s own genius.

In the “Francesca da Rimini” of the same year (now in the Museum of Angers) the same pre-Raphaelite tendencies are even more strongly pronounced. The figures of the two lovers might easily have been designed by Rossetti or Madox Brown.

All these works in which the master’s genius had approved itself with so much originality and fire had left their author to vegetate in poverty and obscurity, while the mediocrities around him had risen rapidly towards fortune and celebrity. Ingres was now anxious to return to Paris, but his meagre resources would not allow it. Then, tired of his hardships, and feeling that the social atmosphere of Rome was not favourable to him, he rejoined his friend Bartolini at Florence, hoping thus, among new surroundings, to re-establish his compromised career. His hopes were falsified. The four years passed in Florence (1820-1824) brought him only a fresh supply of hardships and mortifications. Less hospitable than Rome, Florence brought him only two commissions for portraits, those of M. and Mme. Leblanc (1823-1824); but it was here that he met M. de Pastoret, who was instrumental in getting him the commission which brought the artist his first striking and definitive success. M. de Pastoret was so pleased with Ingres’ “Entry of Charles V. into Paris” (painted in 1821) that he obtained for him a commission from the Minister of the Interior for a large picture of “The Vow of Louis XIII.” for the Cathedral of Montauban. This was begun in Florence in 1821 and finished in 1824, in which year it figured in the Salon of Paris. It was one of his pictures with which Ingres was most satisfied. It is also one of the first in which the influence of Raphael, which was to play such a large part in all his future work, is conspicuous. In a letter written in 1821, Ingres said that he was