Ingres

Ingres is one of the most famous figures in all of French art. His Grande Odalisque, the Portrait of Caroline Riviere and the Turkish Bath have become icons of Western painting and are among the Louvre's biggest drawcards. Yet this most classical of 19th-century painters is also the most willfully complex: his work has always been a subject of heated debate and even today it offers a potent mix of the baffling and the fascinating. For Ingres was a multifaceted and sometimes contradictory artistic personality: a marvelous draftsman, passionately in love with nature; an infallible virtuoso of the portrait; a creator of limpid, monumental nudes; the inventor of delicious deformations; a resolute history painter; a rigid doctrinaire; an eclectic who could make capital out of the most varied traditions; an inspired artist; and a truly dreadful bourgeois. Out of this complexity emerge the richness and modernity of an oeuvre whose most strikingly attractive feature is its potent yet chaste eroticism. Book jacket.