French Neoclassical Painter, 1780-1867 was a French Neoclassical painter. Although he considered himself a painter of history in the tradition of Nicolas Poussin and Jacques-Louis David, by the end of his life it was Ingres' portraits, both painted and drawn, that were recognized as his greatest legacy. A man profoundly respectful of the past, he assumed the role of a guardian of academic orthodoxy against the ascendant Romantic style represented by his nemesis Eug??ne Delacroix. His exemplars, he once explained, were "the great masters which flourished in that century of glorious memory when Raphael set the eternal and incontestable bounds of the sublime in art ... I am thus a conservator of good doctrine, and not an innovator." Nevertheless, modern opinion has tended to regard Ingres and the other Neoclassicists of his era as embodying the Romantic spirit of his time, while his expressive distortions of form and space make him an important precursor of modern art..
The Violinist Niccol
1819 Pencil, 298 x 218 mm Mus?e du Louvre, Paris Ingres was a life-long proponent of the primacy of line over colour. His service to art lay in his abilities as a portraitist and as one of the most important draughtsmen of the century. His portrait drawings are remarkable for their psychological empathy and the enormous subtlety with which light and surface area are treated. Ingres, himself a talented violinist, drew a portrait of Niccol?Paganini - at that stage at the very beginning of his career - probably as a reminder of concerts the two friends had performed together. Listen to an example of Paganini's music