Stop and Look – Ingres’ portrait of Louis-Francois Bertin 1832

Bertin (1766-1841) was a leading figure in the cultural world of the new, “bourgeois” King Louis Philippe, who had acceded to the French throne in 1830, and was to be ousted in the Revolution of 1848. He was publisher of a conservative periodical the Journal des Débats, a collector of works of art and friend of artists, among whom Ingres was particularly important. They shared similar outlooks, both political and aesthetic.

In Ingres, the early nineteenth-century passion for all things Grecian was married to a political stance that was conservative if not reactionary. He embodied the classicists’ ideals of pure draughtsmanship and lucidity of presentation, clarity of thought expressed in clarity of design. Ingres is indeed the archetypal fine draughtsman, taking his inspiration from the High Renaissance perfection of Raphael, whom he admired almost to idolatry, and imitated in many of his pictures.

His likeness of Bertin brings these high-minded aesthetic virtues into close contact with the reality of prosperous middle-class Paris: a comfortably well-fed gentleman, not too mindful of the social niceties, is there in front of us, engaging us frankly in conversation. His plump hands are planted firmly on his spread thighs, and a look of intense, rather quizzical interest concentrates his features in an incipient frown. Is he about to say something, or is he waiting for us to make the first conversational move? But clearly, the conversation has already begun: he is mulling over what has just been said, and will no doubt come out with a decisive comment almost immediately.

What’s especially striking about all this is that the immediacy and the vividness of the characterisation are not achieved with free, spontaneous brushwork, but with an almost mathematical precision of touch. Nor are we persuaded by brilliant colour: chromatically, this is one of Ingres’ most subdued works. The figure, in sober black, sits in front of a plain fawn-brown background, varied a little by a slight flare of light from the right. A glimpse of cuff, of shirt-front, the creased shimmer of his satin waistcoat, the play of reflections on his wonderfully rumpled grey hair, are all there is to distract us from his almost painfully penetrating gaze.

We feel we’ve met a really interesting personality, unafraid to be exactly who he is, with no pretension, no “side”. Ingres himself was a man of considerable pretension, but he was also a great artist and his perception of the world around him was sharp and true. Nowhere are those qualities more evident in his work than in this wonderful portrait.

Almost more surprising than this achievement is the fact that Ingres based his picture on a pencil drawing (now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) that he had made of Bertin in exactly the same pose. It’s a fine drawing , but what strikes me is that Ingres, having recorded his acute observations in the informal medium of pencil, went on to produce a technically meticulous painting that seems to penetrate even deeper into the personality of his sitter than the drawing does. Here is the real achievement of the imaginative artist: the recreation of a human being, complete and utterly convincing, not at one remove but at two, in a medium far from spontaneous. In achieving this, Ingres has made his image of M. Bertin both intimate and monumental, a work completely in tune with its time. It is a reflection of modern, bourgeois Paris in a language true to that world, but simultaneously as grand and noble in its way as the portraits of Raphael himself, or of Classical Greece.