him in these short journeys.

“Without being a musician, my father adored music, and sang very well with a tenor voice. He gave me his taste for music and made me learn to play the violin. I succeeded well enough with it to be admitted into the orchestra of the Grand Theatre of Toulouse, where I played a concerto of Viotti with success....”

PLATE II.—MADAME RIVIÈRE
(In the Louvre)

This portrait of “Madame Rivière” is one of the most characteristic works of Ingres’ first period—the period (1800-1806) of that six years’ weary wait to depart for Rome which the bankruptcy of the public exchequer compelled the young artist to submit to. In a list of his works executed immediately before his first portrait of “Bartolini,” painted in 1805, Ingres mentions the portraits of “M. Rivière, Madame Rivière, and their ravishing daughter.” This fixes the date of these three portraits as about 1804. These are often spoken of by French critics as typical specimens of the artist’s “Pre-Raphaelite manner.” All three portraits are now in the Louvre.

In this glowing eulogy of his father there is doubtless a certain amount of pious exaggeration. The man was a true Toulousian, a fine singer, an occasional performer on the violin, an improviser in everything, with a natural gift for drawing and a plastic sense common among his compatriots. That he would have been “one of the first artists of his time” if he had had the advantage of studying in Paris is manifestly absurd. His work shows a want of vigour, of originality, of invention. He had a certain correctness of eye and skill of hand, with some taste for arrangement and effect. That was sufficient for the plaster decorations with which he was mainly occupied, and even for the little portraits in miniature or red chalk which he undertook. But he could not go beyond this, and the only attempt to paint an important picture which he made marks clearly the limits of his talent. His private life was somewhat irregular. He was a great lover of the fair sex, and towards the end of his life his wife was compelled to leave his home.

From the father, then, we may say, Ingres inherited the penetrating vivacity of his sight, the agile suppleness and surety of his fingers, and a certain voluptuous tendency which is particularly noticeable in his nudes; while his immense powers of work, his obstinacy and pugnacity, came from his mother.

At a very early age his father began to teach him drawing and music. He first achieved success as a violinist in the salon of the bishop, but he was at least equally precocious with his pencil. Towards the age of twelve he was taken to Toulouse. He was at first placed with the painter Vigan, and worked under his direction at the Académie Royale. Then he went to the atelier of Roques, where he made rapid progress. It was in Roques’s studio that Ingres was converted to what he called “the religion of Raphael.” Roques had brought back with him from Rome a number of copies of the works of the great painters of the Renaissance, among them one of Raphael’s “Vierge à la Chaise.” Ingres was so impressed by the beauty of this work that he is said to have burst into tears before it. The instruction at the Toulouse Academy, with its insistence on minute accuracy of drawing, also had a great influence on his future career. At the end of his life Ingres, when talking of his early studies at Toulouse, was fond of affirming that he was still “what the little Ingres of twelve years had been.”

At the age of eighteen he was sent to Paris, and had the good fortune—it was his own expression—to be admitted to the studio of Louis David. He quickly gained the esteem of his master, and is said to have been employed to paint the accessories in David’s famous portrait of Madame Récamier. But their good understanding did not last long. Ingres competed for the Grand Prix de Rome in 1799, and David awarded the prize to Granger, an older pupil of his, while Ingres, to his great indignation, was only awarded the second prize. His picture was burnt during the Commune. The following year Ingres carried off the prize. The subject was “Achilles receiving in his Tent the Envoys of Agamemnon.” Flaxman, the English sculptor and illustrator of Homer, spoke so flatteringly of Ingres’ picture that, according to M. Delaborde, his master’s hostility was still further increased. This painting, which is still preserved at the École des Beaux-Arts, shows the young man’s power of vivid and accurate drawing and his respect for the teachings of his master. But under its external conformity to David’s principles it is possible to trace the germs of an originality which was soon to separate the pupil, almost in spite of himself, from the school of his master. For while David admitted the direct imitation of nature only in his portraits and studies of the nude, he insisted on giving the first place to the search for the grand style in his historical compositions.

Already in this picture we see that Ingres was constitutionally incapable of sacrificing on any grounds his unconscious desire to imitate closely, of copying nature. In vain he tries to force himself to attain “style” in the group he has imagined. His group is not harmoniously arranged. It has no vital unity. Each of the figures appeared detached from the others; but they are drawn individually with so much realistic exactitude that the whole has the bizarre aspect of a photograph of an assembly of artists’ models trying different poses in a studio.

As M. de Wyzewa has well said, the young painter had received from heaven at his birth a defect and a quality which remained intimately connected with each other. The defect was a total absence of imagination, invention, or aptitude to raise himself above the reality directly offered to the painter by the sight present to his eyes; and the quality—the very excess of which was the inevitable cause of the defect I have just denoted—the quality was a marvellous, an absolutely exceptional power of seeing, of understanding, and of reproducing that reality. No painter has ever had a more exact vision of the human figure, nor hands more skilful to fix in its entirety on the paper or the canvas what his eyes saw. A Holbein even, with all the fidelity of his realism, was still troubled in his observation of the model by a shade of æsthetic idealism, by the preoccupation of an example to be followed, or by a new process to employ: between Dominique Ingres and his model, so long as he had this model in front of his eyes, no consideration of any kind could interpose itself. The painter was as possessed by his vision, as hypnotised by it, and he was forced to copy it without changing anything. He carried away, indeed, as the result of his stay in David’s studio, a body of doctrines to which he remained on the whole faithful all his life, but nature had given him gifts which were entirely different from those which were needed to put these doctrines into practice. And this explains why this great man, in the ignorance he always remained in of the real source of his originality and greatness, presents to us to-day the paradox of having been the most naturalistic of French painters, while obstinately attempting to make himself the most idealistic.