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Updated: June 27, 2025
For the first and only time in his life he enjoyed a triumph, none the less great because his life-long rival Ingres also took the opportunity of exhibiting a selection of his works in the same building. But in spite of this success, and in spite of his being elected an Academician in 1857, the critics remained incorrigible.
The classic and romantic duel of 1830, the rise of the naturalist opposition to Hugo and romanticism in our own day, are familiar instances of this phenomenon in literature. The revolt of Géricault and Delacroix against David and Ingres are equally well known in the field of painting.
This patient student of the Tuscan Primitives, of Holbein, Chardin, Delacroix, Ingres, and Manet the precepts of Manet taught him to sweeten the wiriness of his modelling and modify his tendency to a certain hardness was willing to trust to time for the verdict of his rare art.
It was during this period that I had the honor of meeting them at the palace of his Serene Highness the Prince of Monaco, and of having charming and interesting personal conversation with them, for the king is a savant and the queen an artist. Ingres was famous for his violin.
He considered Ingres, notwithstanding his science, a small painter in comparison with the Venetians and Spaniards. A painter by compulsion, a contemplative rather than a creative temperament, a fumbler and seeker, nevertheless Paul Cézanne has formed a school, has left a considerable body of work.
At the same time it must be admitted that several of the best artists have not sent any pictures for the last few years, and particularly the present, when amongst the absentees might be cited Ingres, Horace Vernet, Ary Scheffer, Delaroche, etc., who it appears were all employed by the King or government; the consequence was, although there was an immense mass of large historical and scriptural subjects, it was what might have been called a most sorry display.
He literally anticipated Chevreul's discoveries in the law of simultaneous contrasts of colour. Furthermore, he wrote profoundly of his art. He appreciated Chopin before many critics and musicians which would have been an impossible thing for Ingres, though he played the violin and he was kind to the younger men. Need we say that Degas is a great wit, though not a writer; a wit and a critic?
Injustice we worship; all that lifts us out of the miseries of life is the sublime fruit of injustice. Every immortal deed was an act of fearful injustice; the world of grandeur, of triumph, of courage, of lofty aspiration, was built up on injustice. Man would not be man but for injustice. Hail, therefore, to the thrice glorious virtue injustice! What care I that some millions of wretched Israelites died under Pharaoh's lash or Egypt's sun? It was well that they died that I might have the pyramids to look on, or to fill a musing hour with wonderment. Is there one amongst us who would exchange them for the lives of the ignominious slaves that died? What care I that the virtue of some sixteen-year-old maiden was the price paid for Ingres' La Source? That the model died of drink and disease in the hospital, is nothing when compared with the essential that I should have La Source, that exquisite dream of innocence, to think of till my soul is sick with delight of the painter's holy vision. Nay more, the knowledge that a wrong was done that millions of Israelites died in torments, that a girl, or a thousand girls, died in the hospital for that one virginal thing, is an added pleasure which I could not afford to spare. Oh, for the silence of marble courts, for the shadow of great pillars, for gold, for reticulated canopies of lilies; to see the great gladiators pass, to hear them cry the famous "Ave Caesar," to hold the thumb down, to see the blood flow, to fill the languid hours with the agonies of poisoned slaves! Oh, for excess, for crime! I would give many lives to save one sonnet by Baudelaire; for the hymn, "A la très-chère,
I have often thought that an amusing book might be compiled in which the two tendencies would be well distinguished and illustrated. Many of them are on the right side; we should all be delighted to see Sir Charles Holroyd or Mr. Maclagan, for instances, let loose amongst the primitives with forty thousand pounds in pocket. Ingres was accused of distortion, ugliness, and even of incompetence!
There was Ingres, of course; but the period on the whole was singularly barren, and it may be just worth remarking that at no time, perhaps, has French art been so academic, professorial, timid, and uninspired as in the first glorious years of the great Revolution. Here there is nothing to surprise us.
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