Museum Visitors

#78012     72 X 50″     ac

• Ingres: “Self-Portrait at 24 Years Old”, 1804. Chantilly, Musee Conde
• Chagall: “Moi et le village”, 1911. Museum of Modern Art, NY
• van Dongen: “Modjesko, Soprono Singer”, 1903. Museum of Modern Art, NY

This is an ultimate painting about paintings.Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780-1867) is known for classic set pieces – mythological and historical scenes – and for portraits that no one has ever surpassed. Years ago the Director of the Detroit Institute of Arts said to me that, after Raphael, Ingres painted the most beautiful paintings ever created.

This is a delicious painting – Ingres going to a museum to see a collection of twentieth-century paintings, which he would not have understood or tolerated, and taking with him a companion from one of his won sensuous paintings.
Ingres was the bridge between Classical and Romantic painting. Although his roots were in the former, his departures in style and subject were for years anathema to the Academy, to which he was eventually admitted. He was the first great radical of the nineteenth century. His foundations contributed to the outbreak of Romanticism; yet he was so unable to swallow what Romanticism was doing that for years he would not even shake hands with Delacroix, its leader. So it is safe to say that Chagall, Matisse, and van Dongen, arch-moderns, would not have made him grin.

– Lawrance Jeppson