Description
Book SynopsisAn exploration of the portrait art of Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, focusing on his studio practice and his training of students.
Trade Review“Ingres and the Studio is an exciting piece of scholarship that sheds new light on issues of paramount importance to our understanding of nineteenth-century French art: the increasingly interrelated destinies of portraiture and history painting; the importance of female agency within a complex cosmopolitan art world; and the centrality of imagery of women within both a specifically ingriste artistic enterprise and the modern creative imagination more generally.”
—Andrew Shelton,Ohio State University
“Ingres and the Studio offers a powerful new account of Ingres’s principally female portrait subjects, situated in the context of contemporary aesthetic and artistic debates—and no less situated within the context of Ingres’s studio practice and its psychological dynamics.”
—Marc Gotlieb,Williams College
“Betzer effectively points out the unique origins for Ingres’s approach to female portraiture and his distinct influence on a handful of painters marked by his inspiration and technique. . . .
Betzer’s book is thoughtful, challenging, and impeccably well-documented. The quality of the reproductions is superb and the illustrations are well-placed in the text.””
—Barbara Ann Day-Hickman H-France Review
“Betzer’s book presents a welcome opportunity to expand one’s knowledge of some of the lesser known painters in Ingres’s circle and their involvement in painting some of the most influential women of their culture.”
—M. T. Simms Choice
“Through detailed (at times even meticulous) analyses, Betzer opens up prospects for engaging with [some paintings that] are as of yet well beyond the canon of nineteenth-century art. One of the great merits of this book is to make these paintings both interesting and accessible to specialists and non-specialists through Betzer’s passionate discussions and through high-quality reproductions.”
—Mechthild Fend Oxford Art Journal
“Betzer frames Ingres as an innovator whose contributions surpassed struggles waged on academic terrain. By probing the distinction between academic and ingriste, established via the portrait-as-history and negotiated through the bodies of Ingres’s female sitters, Betzer rejects old criticisms to establish ingriste practice as a crucial bridge to modernity, an idea forwarded by her conclusion’s examination of Edgar Degas’s The Bellelli Family (1858-67) as a history portrait. In this handsomely illustrated and persuasively written text, however, Betzer’s true contribution lies in her excavation of Ingres’s frequently dismissed students, many of whom have received relatively minimal critical consideration in the art historical literature.”
—Mary Manning Nineteenth-Century French Studies
Table of ContentsContents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 The Ingriste Portrait as History
2 Ingres’s Studio and the Subjects of Art
3 Julie Mottez, Rome, and Ingriste Myths of Origin
4 Marie d’Agoult, the Aesthetics of Androgyny, and the Apotheosis of Ingrisme
5 Ingres’s Studio Between History and Allegory: Rachel, Antiquity, and Tragédie
Conclusion
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index
