Volume 11, Number 1 · July 11, 1968
A Strange Painter
By Francis Haskell
"Ingres"
Petit Palais, Paris. Oct. 27, 1967—January 29, 1968
"Ingres in Italia"
Villa Medici, Rome. February 26, 1968—April 28, 1968
Ingres Centennial: Drawings, Water-colors, and Oil Sketches from the American Collection, Fogg Art Museum
by Agnes Mongan, by Dr. Hans Naef
New York Graphic Society, 257, 134 plates pp., $8.00
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres
by Robert Rosenblum
Abrams, 160, 48 color plates, 190 illustrations pp., $20.00
Ingres—A Biographical and Critical Study
by Gaëtan Picon
Skira, 128, 50 color plates pp., $7.50
Transformation in Late Eighteenth Century Art
by Robert Rosenblum
Princeton, 240, 215 plates pp., $10.00
A number of books and a series of splendid exhibitions in Paris, Rome, and Harvard to commemorate the centenary of his death have recently thrown some brilliant light on the life and achievement of Ingres. But the more we see and know of him the more strange he becomes. How appropriate it is that, early in his career, he should have been one of the first artists since antiquity to paint the riddle of the Sphinx! For everything about him is puzzling. He was a man whose devoted fidelity to Raphael and to his two successive wives was a legend in his lifetime—a lifetime that embraced the Romantic era, which established the cult of Michelangelo, and the Second Empire, which established the cult of adultery—and yet his feeblest pictures are those which depend most on Raphael, and his most poignant are those which celebrate guilty passion.
Review, 2900 words
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