Bust of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (Ingres - buste sur piédouche)

Bourdelle and the painter Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres (1780-1867) were both born in Montauban. Bourdelle had a genuine yet tempered admiration for his illustrious compatriot, appreciating in particular his skill at drawing. In his lecture at the Grande Chaumière on 6 January 1910, Bourdelle told his students, “Drawing is not just well-drawn thought, it is about understanding. […] Ingres said, ‘Drawing is the probity of art’. But I say to you, ‘Drawing is the whole of art.’” (Translated from French) He acquired pencil studies by the artist, as well as a painting, Portrait of a Woman (MBCO075), which is now attributed to the Ingres “circle”.

Bourdelle certainly recognised himself in the artist’s proud, stubborn temperament, the tireless worker, who had to fight hard to gain recognition for his art and his ideas. As Jean Girou wrote, “For Bourdelle, art was a long labour with sword in hand; it is easy to understand why he adopted the motto of his great compatriot Ingres: ‘it's only by fighting that you achieve something, and fighting is the effort one puts in.’” (Translated from French)

He transformed the thick, bourgeois features of Ingres as an elderly man to give him a “quasi-Olympian majesty”. Dressed in the style of Antiquity (bare chest and toga draped over the left shoulder), it is a powerful bust, which some critics (such as Robert Rey) unhesitatingly compared to Rodin's Balzac (for whom Bourdelle had designed studies at the master's request): a robust build, rugged construction, bull-like neck and enormous, gruff head (‘the muzzle of a plough animal’, a ‘genial toad’).

But it is his proud, haughty, energetic, domineering expression that gives the bust its terribilità, its formidable power. Ingres has the acuity of a bird of prey: his raised head, sharp eyes staring into the distance, and fierce expression evoke Hercules the Archer, which Bourdelle was working on at the same time. His mouth “is drawn with the same decisive stroke as Apollo's”.

He has the ferocious vitality, arrogance and violence of a swashbuckler who is sure he is in the right, like a Jacobin from the French Revolution on the rostrum: “This Ingres could just as easily be a Marat or – if you want to find him a brother in art – a David. Yes, he really looks like a Jacobin of painting,” wrote Fernand Gregh in 1908 (Translated from French).

The bust was a huge success when it was exhibited at the Salon de la Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts in 1908, and the magazine L'Art et les Artistes published a full-page photograph of it in May 1908.

Valérie Montalbetti Kervella