Self-Portrait

1815–1820

Portrait drawings of tourists to make a living

With the French administration gone, painting commissions were rare, and Ingres supplemented his income with pencil portraits of wealthy tourists, chiefly English. To visitors who asked whether this was where the man who draws the little portraits lived, he answered irritably: “No, the man who lives here is a painter!”

1820

Moving to Florence to join Bartolini

In June 1819 the Ingreses visited Bartolini in Florence and were invited to settle there; in spring 1820 they moved and lived in his house for four years. In a fit of irritation Ingres described his life in Rome as “13 years of slavery”.

29 August 1820

The commission for “The Vow of Louis XIII” for Montauban Cathedral

The French Ministry of the Interior commissioned Ingres to paint an altarpiece for the cathedral of his native Montauban on the theme of the Vow of Louis XIII. The commission, which took four years, changed his life and brought him back to the canons of Neoclassicism.

1824

The start of the feud with Delacroix

The confrontation at the Salon of 1824 began Ingres's feud with Delacroix, who embodied the opposite aesthetic. Ingres called Delacroix his “anti-self” and used the administrative resources at his disposal to keep him out of the Institut de France.

12 November 1824

“The Vow of Louis XIII” at the Salon of 1824

Ingres showed the picture to which he had given four years at the Salon on 12 November 1824, alongside Delacroix's Massacre at Chios, and it was dubbed the “Salon of the Romantic battle”. Admirers and critics alike said the same of him: “the Raphael of our day” and “the best antidote to the Romantic threat”.

c. 1824 – 1825

His own drawing school in Paris

Soon after the Salon closed Ingres rented a studio on the rue des Marais-Saint-Germain and opened a school for young artists there; the first pupil was Amaury-Duval, and within a year as many as a hundred could attend. He called it the “School of Drawing”.