KEY POINTS:
In all art history there is no artist whose name is harder to pronounce than that of the great Romantic painter Auguste Dominique Ingres.
The outstanding painter of his time - the 19th century - he was rivalled only by the Romantic Delacroix. Like Delacroix, he has many paintings in the Louvre. The most memorable is a circular painting full of nude women in a harem which Ingres always insisted was a study of the five senses. His classifying tendencies led him to idealise the female body, notably in his celebrated Grande Odalisque who has a long curved back that seems to have several extra vertebrae.
Ingres did not confine himself to painting nude women. He was an ambitious painter and he adored Raphael. His aim was to create big compositions like Raphael and sweet Madonnas in the Renaissance manner. In the Louvre, a big painting of Parnassus assembles the great writers and artists of history around the central figure of blind Homer. To the chagrin of English-speaking people, Shakespeare is almost lost, tucked away in the bottom left-hand corner.
Ingres spent many of his formative years in Italy, where he supported himself by playing the violin as a professional in various orchestras. He was an excellent musician and this has embedded a phrase in the French language, "the violin of Ingres", the expression given to an activity which a person pursues as a hobby at which they are nearly as proficient as their main profession. Ingres' violin is preserved in the Ingres Museum in Montauban on the River Tarn about 50km north of Toulouse.
Ingres, born in Montauban, is its favourite son. The main road into the town is named after him. Close by the Pont Vieux, the main crossing of the river, a substantial pink brick building dated 1335 is now the Museum of Ingres. It was originally built by the Black Prince when England ruled much of France. When the English left, it became a bishop's palace.
After the revolution the palace became civic property and a small museum. In the middle of the 19th century Ingres thought about bequeathing his collection to his home town. He died in 1867 and left everything in his studio, including thousands of drawings, to the museum.
Long before, he had been commissioned by the city to do a large painting for the cathedral of Montauban. The Vow of Louis XIII still hangs in a chapel on the left-hand side of the nave of the cathedral.
It's an impressive painting. In the midst of the struggles between Catholics and Protestants in France, King Louis XIII made a vow to restore the whole of France to Catholicism. The cathedral was part of the reassertion of the Catholic faith in a town that tended towards Protestantism. Its cold white stone and columns look rather out of place in a largely brick town.
Ingres' painting, presented in 1830, shows the king in his robes kneeling in front of the Virgin Mary. His raised hands offer his crown and sceptre to the Queen of Heaven, who appears as a vision. The vision is revealed by two angels who draw back curtains from an enthroned Mary holding the Christ Child. The whole expression of the Mother and Child is strongly reminiscent of a famous Madonna by Raphael that is now in Dresden.
There is a link between the museum and Auckland. One wing of the museum is devoted to the work of the sculptor Emile Antoine Bourdelle. Every visitor to the Musee D'Orsay will remember his Hercules as an archer, braced with his foot against a rock. In Paris the work is in bronze but the original in plaster still graces the museum in Montauban. Bourdelle also made wonderful sculptured heads of Beethoven, one of which is in Auckland Art Gallery.
