No-one seriously doubted the ability of Monet or Pollock to draw the crowds to the Royal Academy and the Tate, but the surprise hit among exhibitions in London so far this year has been the National Gallery's show of portraits by Ingres. What sounds like a rather dry, fusty affair - a parade of self-important representatives of the 19th-century French bourgeoisie - has turned out to be an enormous popular success, fuelled by sober but enthusiastic critical reaction and simple word of mouth. Masses of visitors have stood awestruck before hyper-real paintings of dignitaries, socialites, politicians and friends at Portraits by Ingres: Image of an Epoch.
The peculiar quality of the originals does not come across satisfactorily in reproduction. They are not exactly life-like; they are more than life-like. They are life as seen with an intense, sustained attention to detail, an almost robotic concentration. When Baudelaire described the paintings as ideal reconstructions of individuals he was pretty close to the mark. Yet despite the uncannily realistic sheen of his images, Ingres takes numerous anatomical liberties, something that used to drive his critics into a frenzy.
The virtual-reality evenness of treatment that characterises his style extends to the clothing of his sitters - something often relegated to a minor supporting role in portraiture. Not for Ingres. While, during his lifetime, he was seen as an indifferent painter of flesh, his liking for painting fabrics was readily apparent: he renders palpable the distinctive texture and fall of cotton, silk, satin, cashmere and velvet, for example - not to mention those ruffs of diaphanous lace, luxuriant fur stoles, peacock feathers and other accessories. So much so, this aspect of his work forms the subject of a sumptuously illustrated book, Ingres in Fashion, by Aileen Ribero of the Courtauld Institute, published to coincide with the exhibition.
If asked to choose one painter "whose work is the most fruitful and instructive to the historian of dress" for the first half of the 19th century, she writes, "it would be Ingres". She goes on to describe how this is not just a matter of general impressions. His drawings and paintings faithfully reflect not just a sense of overall style but also fabric-type, cut and even the practical, intricate construction of the garments. If we so chose, we could recreate garments from the evidence of his images.
In their time, the paintings became part of a debate about appropriate attire in portraiture. Ribero elucidates the way Ingres's career paralleled the development of a middle-class consumer society and, later, couture in France. Though he was a Neoclassicist, and a defender of classical values in French painting, in his portraits he effectively dispensed with the classical avoidance of depicting contemporary dress. It is his almost obsessive fidelity to appearances that makes him, in Baudelaire's famous phrase, a painter of modern life. The word chic emerged in mid-century, and Ribero suggests the women in Ingres's portraits have in common a sense of chic - "To be chic a woman needs to have an expert knowledge of dress, and the confidence to know what suits her personally." Certainly the women Ingres depicts appear immensely stylish and assured - understandably so, perhaps, given that they were generally wealthy and acutely conscious of the role of fashion in signifying and validating their social position.
Like many artists, Ingres is on record as viewing portrait commissions as a necessary evil, a means of making money (he moaned about sitters' inability to hold a pose, unlike paid models, and their vanity). Yet his absorption in the process, the staggering lengths he went to in pursuit of veracity of detail and the care he lavished on the finished products all surely contradict his expressions of disdain.
At the time, the most prestigious area of endeavour was history painting. That is what artists aspired to do, and portraiture was usually a means of providing an income and a public profile sufficient to make that possible. Ingres was no exception. He was born at Montauban in the south of France in 1780. His father, an artist, recognised and encouraged his talent - in music as well as painting, incidentally, and throughout his life he was a proficient violinist. Just another provincial painter trying to make his way in the capital, he studied with the great Neoclassicist Jacques-Louis David, and is reputed to have had a hand in the painting of David's celebrated Madame Recamier.
The most conspicuous painting in the first rooms of the exhibition is his preposterous portrait Napoleon on his Imperial Throne, a camp extravaganza. The award of the Prix de Rome brought him, after some delay, to Italy, where he was to spend, in all, 24 years of his working life. He painted many brilliant portraits in Italy, including studies of powerful French officials and friends. Surprisingly, he stayed on after the collapse of French rule.
He revered Raphael - "Raphael is always right," was his truculent response to any criticism of the master - but his own history paintings are impeccable, chilly, ossified versions of Raphael: big, overwrought, formalised compositions that lack a vital spark. Critical acclaim for them paved the way for his return to Paris, where he assumed a central role in artistic life and largely eschewed portraiture. There are some notable exceptions, though, including one masterpiece, a painting of Louis-Francois Bertin, an influential journalist and founder of the Journal des De- bates. This superb painting of a spirited, combative character is his best-known male portrait, and it has to be said Bertin exhibits a degree of animation that is not found in Ingres's paintings of women.
When the critical tide turned against his increasingly outmoded historical work, with the rise of Romanticism, he again decamped to Rome, this time as director of the French Academy. He painted no portraits until his eventual return to Paris when, in the final phase of his career, he made studies of Parisian society women, including two stunning paintings of Madame Moitessier, a noted society hostess, described by some sources as the trophy wife of a wealthy banker.
Both paintings are in the London show. Plain fabrics are the rule in portraits, on the basis that they show off rather than (as patterns are all too likely to), overwhelm the sitter. The National Gallery's own picture shows Madame seated, wearing a dress of "sumptuously brocaded silk from Lyons", a dress that is, in Ribero's words, "almost ferocious in the intensity of its pattern and ornament". It is a painting that brings visitors to a standstill.
In the sister work, from Washington's National Gallery, Madame is pictured standing. Her pale, bare shoulders emerge dramatically from a low-cut black gown of velvet and lace, "like a goddess arising from a sea of filmy black draperies". Her plump arms - rather an Ingres speciality - reflect fashionable embonpoint but even so there were tactful representations made to the artist through intermediaries to thin them down slightly. Both paintings are augmented by some of the meticulous preparatory drawings that went into this and all of his projects.
Together with the other drawings in the show, including a good sample of his justly celebrated small portrait sketches, they amply reward a visit in themselves. "Drawing is the probity of art," is Ingres's most famous quoted statement. He also said that drawing is seven-eighths of the content of painting. But then he was an absolutely superb draughtsman. In fact it is difficult to think of another artist who has used line so eloquently and sensitively, and so unostentatiously. His touch is light, assured and precise. While he produced shaded and tinted drawings, generally it is his brilliantly descriptive, briskly paced line that does the work, mapping out features, bodies, clothes and furniture with impassive but enthralling efficiency. Most of the drawings, by comparison with the seamless perfection of the paintings, look relaxed and informal, but you quickly realise the seeming casualness of the line simply wouldn't work if it wasn't exactly right. Many artists can duplicate the casualness, but very, very few can match the precision. Degas and Picasso are among those who obviously looked and learned.
Picasso, Matisse and Braque were among Ingres's formidable, non-academic admirers in the early part of this century. The great achievement of the National Gallery show, and Ribero's excellent book, is that they rescue Ingres from the backwater of art history to which current assessments of his work had more or less consigned him, largely on the basis of his paintings of the female nude and his academic history paintings. He has understandably suffered a bad press in feminist readings of his infamous, voyeuristic Turkish Bath with its disconcerting expanses of plump, depilated female flesh. Ribero tackles the issue directly, and with considerable sympathy to Ingres, locating this and related works as products of their time. But she goes further and suggests that, after all, "there is no reason to suppose that women could not take pleasure in looking at female nudes," then or now. There is some irony in the fact that now, at the end of the 20th century, what we value most in his output is precisely what he valued least, but his achievement is none the less deserving of attention for that.
Portraits by Ingres can be seen at the National Gallery, London until April 25th. A fully illustrated catalogue is available, price £28 in UK, paperback. Ingres in Fashion by Aileen Ribero is published by Yale University Press at £30 in UK
