Art History

ISSN 0141-6790

Vol. 23

No. 5

December 2000 pp. 726742

Ingres versus Delacroix

Andrew Carrington Shelton
In October 1855 the satirical newspaper Le Charivari published a humorous monologue in which Monsieur Prudhomme, the veritable embodiment of bourgeois pedantry and pretence, attempts to come to terms with what was undoubtedly the year's most momentous artistic event: the confrontation on the walls of the Exposition universelle of the works of the two leading lights of the contemporary French school Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (plate 38) and Eugene Delacroix (plate 39). `I begin by making my profession of faith,' M. Prudhomme pompously proclaims: M. Delacroix and M. Ingres, M. Ingres and M. Delacroix. M. Delacroix is not M. Ingres, but, on the other hand, M. Ingres is not M. Delacroix. That's certainly clear! Ah! if only M. Delacroix could be M. Ingres, if only M. Ingres could be M. Delacroix! But M. Delacroix is not M. Ingres and M. Ingres is not M. Delacroix.1 In the intervening century and a half since Monsieur Prudhomme uttered his pronouncement, countless other critics and historians have revisited the issue of the seemingly epochal conflict between Ingres and Delacroix; the alleged rivalry between the two artists has, in fact, come to represent metonymically what is generally regarded as the key duality around which histories of early nineteenth-century French painting must inevitably be structured the conflict between an officially sanctioned and institutionally entrenched neoclassicism, on the one hand, and a wilfully oppositional, irreverent and stridently non-conformist Romanticism, on the other. What I aim to do in this essay is not to re-evaluate the validity of this conventional polarization to assess, once again, the extent to which Ingres can legitimately be conceived of as the incarnation of a kind of an arch-traditionalist, rule-bound classicism in opposition to the wildly innovative, Romantic free-for-all epitomized by Delacroix. Rather, I propose to investigate the early history of what I will call the Ingres/Delacroix dichotomy as a function of discourse a particular mode of conceiving of understanding and articulating the two painters' achievement which arose at a precise historical moment and which, rightly or wrongly, has continued to inform the critical and historical assessment of their art ever since. My argument will hinge on what I believe is a rather surprising fact of chronology. For even though, as all scholars agree, the polarity between classicism 726
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38 Ingres installation, 1855 Exposition universelle. Photo: courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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Delacroix installation, 1855 Exposition universelle. Photo: Bibliotheque nationale.

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40 (left) Eugene Delacroix, Massacre at Chios, 1824. Oil on canvas. Musee du Louvre, Paris. Photo: Agence photographique de la reunion des musees nationaux. 41 (opposite above) JeanAuguste-Dominique Ingres, The Apotheosis of Homer. Oil on canvas. Musee du Louvre, Paris. Photo: Agence photographique de la reunion des musees nationaux. 42 (opposite below) Eugene Delacroix, Death of Sardanapalus, 1827. Oil on canvas. Musee du Louvre, Paris. Photo: Agence photographique de la reunion des musees nationaux.

and Romanticism was established as a dominant feature of the critical discourse on French painting in the 1820s,2 it was not until almost two decades later, in the mid to late 1840s, that the controversy began to be consistently represented in the form of a highly personalized rivalry between Ingres and Delacroix. It is this twenty-year lag-time that I will attempt to account for in this paper; but first, a few art-historical myths must be dismantled. Traditionally, the conflict between Ingres and Delacroix has been configured around two red-letter dates in the history of early nineteenth-century French painting: 1824 and 182728. For it was at the Salons of these years that the rivalry between the two artists is presumed to have been ignited by the violent clash of their most paradigmatic statements of aesthetic faith. Yet, it occurred to no one, as far as I know, actually to compare Ingres's reputation-making Le Voeu de Louis XIII (see plate 30, page 713) with Delacroix's equally celebrated Massacre at Chios (plate 40) in 1824; similarly, and perhaps even more surprisingly, not a single critic in 182728 thought to contrast Ingres's great neoclassical manifesto, The Apotheosis of Homer (plate 41), with Delacroix's no less programmatically Romantic Death of Sardanapalus (plate 42). The failure of reviewers to undertake what seems to most of us today to be such an obvious and illuminating exercise in comparative analysis can be explained in part by the circumstances under which these works were exhibited. In 1824 Ingres's Voeu entered the Salon late, well 728
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43 Paul Delaroche, The Execution of Lady Jane Grey. Oil on canvas. National Gallery, London. By kind permission of the Trustees of the National Gallery.

after most of the critics had already had their say on Delacroix's Chios.3 In 1827 it was not only a temporal gap but also a spatial disjunction that blinded critics to the comparative potential between the two artists' works. For whereas Delacroix's Sardanapalus was part of the Salon proper, Ingres's Homer was stuck on a ceiling in the Musee Charles X in another part of the Louvre.4 Such near-misses continued to characterize the exhibition histories of the two artists over the next several years. In 1831, when Delacroix unveiled his momentous 28th of July: Liberty Leading the People (Paris, Musee du Louvre), Ingres abstained from the Salon altogether; similarly, in 1833, when Ingres created a sensation with his celebrated portrait of Jean-Francois Bertin (Paris, Muse e du Louvre), Delacroix attracted only sparse critical attention with several minor portraits and subject paintings.5 Finally, in 1834, the last year in which Ingres participated in the official exhibition, the centrality of the battle between his ill-fated Martyrdom of Saint Symphorien (Autun, Cathe drale de Saint-Lazare) and The Execution of Lady Jane Grey (plate 43) by Paul Delaroche (London, National Gallery) precluded anyone considering the comparative potential between Ingres's work and Delacroix's major contributions to that year's Salon: The Women of Algiers (Paris, Musee du Louvre) and The Battle of Nancy (Nancy, Musee des Beaux-Arts).6 730
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While the failure of a clear Ingres/Delacroix dichotomy to emerge over the course of the seminal decade between 1824 and 1834 can be attributed in part to the vagaries of the two artists' exhibition histories, it is also indicative of the still somewhat ambiguous positions occupied by the two painters within contemporary critical discourse. For even though it was immediately clear to everyone that Delacroix was an important representative of the so-called `nouvelle ecole', he had not yet emerged as its unambiguous leader rather, in the mid- to late 1820s such artists as Xavier Sigalon, Eugene Deveria, Alexandre Decamps, Ary Scheffer and most especially Horace Vernet were just as likely to be identified as the standard-bearers of the new aesthetic. Thus, in 1824, when Etienne Delecluze initiated the Salonniers' debate over Romanticism and classicism by dividing the contemporary school into proponents of the `Homeric' and `Shakespearean' modes, it was not Ingres and Delacroix whom he used to exemplify this dichotomy but rather Ingres and Vernet.7 Ingres's position in the 1820s and early 1830s was perhaps even more ambiguous than that of Delacroix; for while no one doubted his affiliation with a rather vaguely conceived camp of traditionalists, he was simultaneously regarded as enacting a radical break with Davidian orthodoxy that was then most closely identified with the Academy.8 As a result, Ingres's principal antagonists in the late 1820s and early 1830s were as likely to be culled from within the Institut as without. It was, for instance, Gros that Ingres was seen as displacing as chef d'ecole when his teaching atelier first began to flourish in the early 1830s.9 Similarly, in 1833, when rumours began to circulate that the new Orleanist monarch Louis-Philippe was about to appoint a Premier peintre du roi, a rivalry developed in the press between Ingres and Vernet, who were deemed the two leading candidates for the post.10 And finally, as we have already seen, it was a showdown between Ingres and the newly elected Academician Paul Delaroche that dominated the Salon of 1834, provoking Ingres, who as usual felt himself to have been slighted by the critics, to renounce exhibiting at the official exhibition altogether.11 It was on the sidelines of these skirmishes between Ingres and his Academic colleagues that the rivalry with Delacroix slowly began to emerge. Significantly, the earliest instance I have found in which much is made of the nascent competition between the two artists was provoked not by an actual confrontation of their works on the walls of the Salon but rather in anticipation of just such an event. In an article that appeared in L'Artiste in 1832, an anonymous writer argues for the necessity of continuing the tradition of having periodic re-installations at the Salon as a means of avoiding startling and potentially injurious juxtapositions of violently clashing works. To illustrate his point, this critic explains that the pictures of Ingres and Delacroix `the two men who presently dominate painting' should never be viewed simultaneously because their radically contrasting styles would effectively cancel out one another: It's the battle between antique and modern genius. M. Ingres belongs in many respects to the heroic age of the Greeks; he is perhaps more of a sculptor than a painter; he occupies himself exclusively with line and form, purposefully neglecting animation and colour [. . .] M. Delacroix, in contrast, wilfully sacrifices the rigours of drawing to the demands of the
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drama he depicts; his manner, less chaste and reserved, more ardent and animated, emphasizes the brilliance of colour over the purity of line.12 Six years later the Republican critic Theophile Thore, in a review of an exhibition of the works of the pensionnaires labouring under Ingres's supervision at the French Academy in Rome, characterized the rivalry in a similar fashion: `On one side [Ingres], the severity of line, dryness of modelling, sobriety of colour and placidity of composition; on the other side [Delacroix], the impetuosity of execution, the brilliance of lighting, the verve of invention, the restlessness of innovation, and the excitement of contemporary passions.'13 Unlike the critic of 1832, Thore believed that these contrasting manners were not mutually exclusive but could indeed should be joined together into one harmonious whole. What is striking about these very early articulations of the Ingres/Delacroix dichotomy is how utterly complete they are with regard to the subsequent history of the rivalry. Few critics or historians for that matter have ventured beyond the kinds of pat oppositions stated here: antiquity versus modernity, form versus expression, tradition versus innovation, repose versus animation, etc., etc. That the basic terms of the rivalry were established so quickly can be attributed to the simple fact that nothing the critics encountered in the contrasting manners of the two artists was new, at least not from a conceptual standpoint. For the kinds of oppositions enumerated by Thore and the critic for L'Artiste were all variations upon that most fundamental of dualities within traditional aesthetic discourse: le dessin versus la couleur. This well-worn dichotomy, which had stood at the very centre of French Academic theory since the great battle of the Rubenistes and the Poussinistes at end of the seventeenth century,14 provided a ready-made template for what must ultimately be characterized as the highly conventionalized and at times positively rote and unthinking polarizations of Ingres and Delacroix. Some writers basically admitted as much. `This is the eternal antagonism between the spirit and the flesh, between the ideal and the real, between dogma and fact,' Louis de Lomenie asserted in his biography of Ingres published in 1840, `It is as present between Plato and Epicurus, Lamartine and Horace, Montesquieu and Bentham as it is between the Roman and the Flemish schools, between Raphael and Rubens, between Ingres and Delacroix.'15 By 1845 such casting of the rivalry between Ingres and Delacroix as the latest re-enactment of the age-old battle between the purity (or coldness) of line and the sensuality (or vulgarity) of colour had become a critical commonplace16 a development that can be read as both cause and effect of the somewhat belated solidification of the two artists' reputations as the undisputed leaders of the classical and Romantic camps. By the mid-1840s the sexagenarian Ingres was universally regarded as the pre-eminent keeper of the classical flame, while Delacroix had emerged as the veritable embodiment of pictorial Romanticism even if, as critics often noted, this was not necessarily the status to which he himself consciously aspired.17 If the antithetical pairing of Ingres and Delacroix became a critical convention only around 1845, it was not until the middle of the following decade that this duality was supported by the kinds of titanic clashes that historians have tended to situate in the 1820s and early 1830s. The first major confrontation between the 732
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two artists' works occurred in the Spring of 1854 with the unveiling of the new decorations in the refurbished Hotel-de-Ville.18 In what must have been a conscious effort on the part of municipal authorities to showcase the talents of the rival chefs d'ecole, Ingres and Delacroix were commissioned to decorate pendant rooms on the back of the building's main block. The unveiling of these decorations, which perished in the conflagrations of the Commune in May 1871, sparked a new round of critical comparisons of the two artist's contrasting styles the first to be based on the direct physical juxtaposition of newly completed works.19 Exactly one year later, the ultimate demonstration of the Ingres/ Delacroix dichotomy was staged on the walls of the 1855 Exposition universelle in the form of the large retrospective displays accorded the two artists (plates 38 and 39).20 On this occasion critical comparisons between Ingres and Delacroix became absolutely de rigueur,21 although there were more than a few reviewers who expressed disdain for what they regarded as a totally exhausted exercise. `The differences which separate these Messieurs are known a hundred times over,' Noemie Cadiot complained `their reciprocal tendencies have been compared, appreciated and discussed thousands of times.'22 In order fully to appreciate the very hackneyed nature that Cadiot and others came to ascribe to the rivalry between Ingres and Delacroix we must abandon the art-historical solemnities of Salon criticism and Academic theory for the more popular and decidedly low-brow forms of cultural discourse that began to flourish at mid-century. For it is not in the writings of the great critical thinkers of the age (the Baudelaires, the Thores and the Gautiers)23 that the duality received its boldest and most iconic expression, but rather in the works of gossip mongers and satirists, of society columnists and, most especially, of cultural caricaturists. One of the most potent means through which the rivalry between Ingres and Delacroix came to be promulgated was the biographical anecdote both the seemingly authentic and the wilfully fictitious. By the mid-1850s narrative accounts illustrating the animosity between the two artists were regularly reported in the press. Thus, in 1855 the art critic Louis Enault became the first to recount the famous episode in which Ingres allegedly complained of smelling sulphur immediately after Delacroix exited his gallery in the Exposition universelle;24 a year later Eugene de Mirecourt included in his light-hearted biography of Ingres a secondhand account of Delacroix having an apoplectic fit when one of the visitors to his studio dared to proclaim the merits of his bitter rival;25 and in 1857 we are informed by a certain Alberic Second, society columnist for La Comedie parisienne, that Ingres showed up at the Institut dressed completely in grey on the day that Delacroix was finally elected to the Academy.26 Such anecdotes, the majority of which are almost certainly spurious, continued to multiply throughout the second half of the century and still today find their way into historical writing on the artists with surprising regularity. Their ultimate value lies less in what they purport to tell us about the two artists' actual feelings towards one another27 than in their documentation of the extent to which their legendary animosity had entered the burgeoning domain of a media-driven cult of celebrity.28 For it was not the public's interest in the line-versus-colour controversy that the authors of these anecdotes wanted to tap into, but rather its fascination with childish displays of personal pique on the part of two of the nation's most vaunted cultural luminaries.
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Even more potent in popularizing (and, of course, vulgarizing) the Ingres/ Delacroix dichotomy were the caricaturists. Indeed, I think it is not accidental that the actual consolidation of the rivalry in the mid-1840s coincided with the invention of that most popular and irreverent brand of art criticism the `Salons caricaturaux.'29 The first of these compendia of humorous recreations of individual works, interspersed with equally hilarious send-ups of the characters who produced and consumed them, appeared in 1843; within a decade, the `Salons caricaturaux' had become a standard component of the critical repertoire, with the most popular specimens of the genre encompassing dozens of individual images. These caricatures have tended to enter the art-historical discourse as piquant demonstrations of just how poorly the innovations of the beleaguered avant garde were understood by their philistine publics. Yet the makers of these images were equal-opportunity detractors and were just as likely to ridicule the productions of the most-honoured Academic as those of the most outrageous young Turk.30 Indeed, the principal aim of these caricaturists was not to articulate any particular aesthetic position they wanted to be able to ridicule them all but rather to thumb their noses at the pretence of the art world across the board. Thus here again, it was the public's delight in seeing the mighty laid low that was principally at work in this form of critique. The earliest cartoon I have found that features a direct, head-to-head confrontation between Ingres and Delacroix is not from a `Salon caricatural' but, certainly not incidentally, was produced by one of the inventors of this genre, Charles-Albert, Vicomte d'Arnoux, better known as Bertall. In this print (plate 44), a sort of caricatural group portrait of artistic and musical luminaries which appeared in the second volume of Le Diable a Paris in 1846, the rivalry assumes its standard form as a dispute between line and colour. Delacroix, planted defiantly beside a shaggy tipped paint brush with a placard proclaiming line to be a myth, dangles before his antagonist a bulging sack labelled `law of colours'. Ingres counters with a banner suspended from a finely tipped porte-crayon declaring himself the prophet of greyness (`Il n'y a de gris que de gris et M. Ingres est son prophete'). He also points with authority to a wiry, serpentine line drawn on the ground at his feet inscribed `ligne de Raphael revue, corrigee et supplementee par Monsieur Ingres.' This stand-off is witnessed by various other artistic celebrities of the day, most notably Paul Delaroche, the popular but critically disparaged painter who, by the mid-1840s, had emerged as the leading proponent of the socalled juste milieu a median, conciliatory position that sought to strike a balance between the extremes of classicism and Romanticism, just as the constitutional regime of the reigning monarch, Louis-Philippe, sought to forge an ideological compromise between the despotism of divine-right monarchy, on the one hand, and the anarchy of a democratic republic, on the other.31 Like many of his contemporaries, Bertall characterizes this position as one of weakness and indecision, representing Delaroche scratching his head in bewilderment over which option to choose the ligne of Monsieur Ingres or the couleur of Delacroix. What I find most striking about this caricature is less its thoroughly clicheed characterization of the individual artists than how methodically it manages to categorize the contemporary art world to break it down into a series of discreet aesthetic positions, each with its own standard-bearer or figurehead. Indeed, what 734
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44 Bertall, La Musique. La Peinture. La Sculpture, from Le Diable a Paris, vol. 2, 1846. Photo: Brown University Library, Providence Rhode Island.

seems to be at work here is what Arnold Hauser, in his long-neglected but recently resurrected Social History of Art, posits as one of the principal sociological developments in French art of the Romantic era the radical fragmentation of aesthetic discourse through the politicization of art.32 By this, Hauser means not simply (or even primarily) the affiliation of various literary or artistic trends with specific ideological movements but rather the imposition onto both the practice and theoretical conceptualization of art of a distinctively modern mode of political partisanship. Hauser posits the post-Napoleonic era of constitutional monarchy (181448) as the period in which artistic orthodoxy lost its authority in France; what he perceives as succeeding the demise of the traditional power structure centred on the twin authorities of Academy and King, however, is not the triumph of a renegade Romanticism, but rather the emergence of a conglomerate of mutually antagonistic movements or groups `schools' in
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45 Bertall, Republique des arts, from Le Journal pour rire, 28 July, 1849. Photo: courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

conventional art-historical parlance none of which was capable of claiming hegemonic authority over its rivals. And here we might note that the antagonism between Ingres and Delacroix was very much a combat among equals. For even though Ingres had the authority of the Institut on his side, it was Delacroix who enjoyed the more illustrious career as an official artist. It was he, for instance, who had more pictures hanging in prestigious public collections and who had garnered the reputation of being the only real monumental decorator of his age.33 Ingres, in contrast, was rapidly degenerating into a mere talker someone who professed to be a peintre d'histoire in the most traditional sense but who, in actuality, spent most of his time meticulously recording the extravagant toilettes of rich socialites or painting naked women.34 That the radical fragmentation of the post-Napoleonic artistic discourse exemplified by the Ingres/Delacroix dichotomy was at least partly modelled upon, if not necessarily inspired by, contemporary political developments is rendered explicit in a second and far more celebrated caricature by Bertall which appeared in the Journal pour rire on 28 July 1849 (plate 45). This ultra-famous image, which was probably prompted by Delacroix's frustrated attempts to win election to the Academy (he was thwarted twice in 1849),35 presents the two rivals in the guise of medieval jousters charging towards one another at full tilt in the courtyard before the Palais de l'Institut, or according to Bertall's witty inscription, the `Hotel des Invalides de l'Art'. Here again, Ingres is configured as the veritable embodiment of drawing and seeks to inflict his damage with a lethally sharpened porte-crayon. Delacroix, the equally intractable champion of colour, counters with a bucket of paint, a palette and a thick, bushy brush. 736
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As ubiquitous as this image has become, it has never, as far as I know, been the subject of sustained art-historical analysis. Indeed, the immense appeal of the print lies for most of us, I think, in how perfectly it encapsulates the conflict between classicism and Romanticism, succinctly reducing the complex phenomenon down to an iconic encounter between the two warring chefs d'ecole. Such simplicity is misleading, however, for the caricature is embedded in a series of texts which position the battle within a semantic field extending far beyond the purely aesthetic debate over the relative merits of line versus colour. Among the various slogans alternately vaunting and denigrating the dessinateurs and couleuristes scrawled onto the arms of the two warriors are several maxims that are derived directly from the realm of contemporary political discourse. Inscribed across the top of Ingres's shield, for example, is the device `La Couleur est une Utopie', while emblazoned along the bottom edge of his horse's skirt is the slogan `Rubens est un rouge'. Both accusations are modelled upon the rhetoric of conservative forces within the newly established Second Republic who were engaged in a pitched battle against the `Red' menace of socialism, which was just then emerging as a formidable political force in France.36 Should any one have missed the point, Bertall's analogy between political and artistic extremism is stated most unequivocally in the long caption that accompanies the print: The Republic of Art. Duel to the death between M. Ingres, the Thiers of line, and M. Delacroix, the Proudhon of colour. It's a no-win situation. If M. Ingres triumphs, colour will be banned from every line, and any insurgent found with the tiniest bladder of paint will be subjected to the ultimate punishment. If Delacroix is the victor, line will be outlawed with such rigour that people found fishing under the Pont-Neuf will be immediately arrested. Some people have dared speak of a fusion of line and colour, but this project seems so ridiculous and extravagant that we mention it here just as a reminder.37 Now what is to be made of all this? Most particularly, what is the significance of Bertall's wilfully ridiculous and mutually deflating association of Ingres and Delacroix with the prominent statesmen Adolphe Thiers and Pierre Proudhon? Former Prime Minister to Louis-Philippe and future president of the Third Republic, Thiers had been elected to the National Assembly in June 1848 and quickly emerged as the leader of the conservative `Party of Order'. Among his chief antagonists across the aisle was Proudhon, the reigning figurehead of French socialism who also entered the Assembly in June 1848.38 One's initial reaction is undoubtedly to read Bertall's unlikely comparison as a particularly poignant demonstration of the ideological alignment of the two aesthetic factions to regard it as evidence of just how thoroughly Delacroix and the Romantics were perceived as being allied with the radical Left, while Ingres and the neoclassicists functioned as the artistic representatives of reaction. And indeed, since at least the late 1820s there had been a general tendency to politicize the two movements in precisely this manner.39 This is not, however, the point of Bertall's caricature. For again, it is not so much the ideals of the two warring factions that are being ridiculed here as their rabidly uncompromising, self-righteous partisanship. It is,
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in other words, the form of contemporary artistic and political discourse that is being mocked here, as much as if not more than its content. By the time the epochal confrontation imagined in this print finally took shape on the walls of the 1855 Exposition universelle, Bertall's peculiarly political model for representing the antagonism between Ingres and Delacroix had become commonplace. In his review for L'Illustration, for instance, A.J. Du Pays, a remarkably perspicacious if under-appreciated critic, attributed the persistence of the duality to the public's insistence on clearly defined aesthetic categories drawn along the lines of political parties. `Voila une situation bien tranchee,' the critic declared with resignation, `it is like the Left and the Right of the old Chamber of Deputies.'40 Thus, even though the Ingres/Delacroix dichotomy was squarely centred on the age-old polarity of line versus colour, its significance within the cultural discourse of mid-nineteenth-century France extended far beyond this rather arcane and exhausted Academic debate. Indeed, as I hope this essay has shown, it was not on the rarefied plane of aesthetics that the rivalry between the two artists operated most effectively, but rather as a means of articulating a diverse set of interests and desires of a decidedly less lofty sort. Andrew Carrington Shelton Ohio State University Notes
The material in this paper is based in part on my unpublished PhD thesis, `From Making History to Living Legend: The Mystification of Monsieur Ingres (18341855)', Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, 1997. I would like to thank the members of my committee, Professors Robert Rosenblum, Linda Nochlin and Donald Posner, for their insightful comments on my original manuscript and for their subsequent support and encouragement. I would also like to thank Adrian Rifkin and Susan Siegfried for the opportunity to present this material in their session on `Fingering Ingres' at College Art in February 2000. 1 Arnould Fremy, `M. Prudhomme a l'exposition. La peinture francaise', Le Charivari, 23 October 1855, as quoted in Patricia Mainardi, Art and Politics of the Second Empire: The Universal Expositions of 1855 and 1867, New Haven and London, 1987, p. 73. 2 See, for example, Pontus Grate, `La Critique d'art et la bataille romantique', Gazette des beaux-arts, vol. 54, no. 1088, September 1959, pp. 12948 and J.J.L. Whiteley, `The Origin and the Concept of ``Classique'' in French Art Criticism', Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, vol. 39, 1976, pp. 26875. 3 The Voeu de Louis XIII was featured in the final re-hanging of the 1824 Salon, which opened on 12 November. It was thereby featured if at all only in the very last instalments of serialized reviews. Delacroix's Chios had been on view since the opening of the exhibition on 25 August and was thus typically treated in reviews that appeared in September or October. 4 The Apotheosis of Homer, which originally decorated the ceiling of room number 9 in the Musee Charles X, was publicly unveiled on 15 December; Delacroix's Sardanapalus was part of the re-installation of the Salon that opened in February 1828. 5 One of only two reviews of the 1833 Salon to discuss Delacroix's portraits did make reference to Ingres, but in a manner suggesting that the rivalry between the two artists was still very much in-the-making. Laviron and Galbacio accuse Delacroix of attempting (unsuccessfully) to `se mettre mesquinement a la suite de l'ecole de M. Ingres' with his realistic but colourless portrait of the schoolboy Auguste Edmond Petit de Beauverger (private collection). See Gabriel Laviron and Bruno Galbacio, Salon de 1833, Paris, 1833, p. 98, as quoted in Lee Johnson, The Paintings of Eugene Delacroix: A Critical Catalogue (18321863), Oxford, 1986, vol. 3, p. 33. 6 See Andrew Carrington Shelton, `From Making History to Living Legend: The Mystification of
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INGRES VERSUS DELACROIX Monsieur Ingres (183455)' unpublished PhD thesis, New York University, pp. 32104, for a detailed analysis of the critical reception of Saint Symphorien and the rivalry that was established between Ingres and Delaroche in 1834. At the end of his review of the Salon of that year, Gustave Planche famously divided the contemporary school into three camps: `La Renovation, La Conciliation et L'Invention', tendencies which correspond to the modern art historical categories of Neoclassicism (Renovation), Romanticism (Invention) and the much-discussed, much-disputed `juste milieu' (Conciliation). While Planche identifies Ingres and Delaroche as the leaders of the renovatory and conciliatory camps respectively, he divides the command of the third party between Delacroix, the genre painter Alexandre Decamps and the landscapist Paul Huet, suggesting here again that the fragmentation of the contemporary school had not yet been reduced down to the iconic simplicity of a clash between Ingres and Delacroix. See Gustave Planche, `Salon de 1834', in Gustave Planche, Etudes sur l'ecole francaise (18311852), Paris, 1855, p. 279. 7 Although Delecluze first introduces the notion of `la poetique shakesperienne' after an extended discussion of Delacroix's Chios, it is only via a comparison of Ingres's portrait of the Baron de Montbreton de Norvins (London, National Gallery) with Vernet's equestrian portrait of King Charles X (Versailles, Musee national du chateau) that he reaches the definitive polarization of `le style homerique' and `le genre shakespearien'. See Etienne Delecluze, `Exposition du Louvre 1824', Journal des Debats, 5 October 1824 (Delacroix) and 12 December 1824 (Ingres and Vernet). For the translation of Delecluze's Homeric and Shakespearean modes into the more familiar categories of classicism and Romanticism see Stendhal's `Salon of 1824', reprinted in Stendhal, Melanges d'art, Paris, 1867, pp. 143254. 8 By 1833 the notion of Ingres having rejected the stiff artificialities of David's classicism for a more naturalistic, neo-Renaissance style based on Raphael was firmly entrenched in the critical discourse on the artist. See, for instance, Etienne Delecluze, `Salon de 1833', Journal des Debats, 22 March 1833, and Anonymous, `Salon de 1833', Le Constitutionnel, 9 March 1833. 9 Pupils of Gros, who had inherited David's teaching atelier upon his exile in 1815, won the Grand Prix six times between 1820 and 1831. This near-monopoly seemed to have been broken in 1832 when Ingres's favourite student, Hippolyte Flandrin, captured the prize. (The following year Ingres's students swept the awards in the most prestigious category of history painting.) See Philippe Grunchec, Le Grand Prix de peinture: Les concours des Prix de Rome de 1797 a 1862, Paris, 1983. On the ascendancy of Ingres as a teacher in the early 1830s, see Pierre Angrand, `Le premier atelier de M. Ingres', Bulletin du Musee Ingres, no. 49, December 1982, pp. 1958. On the buzz about this alleged appointment which never, in fact, was made see Anonymous, `Salon de 1833', op. cit. (note 8), and Louis de Maynard, `Etat actuel de la peinture en France. Salon de 1833', L'Europe litteraire, 1833, p. 58, where Vernet is promoted for the post. The rivalry between Ingres and Vernet was re-ignited in 1841 when it was rumored (again falsely) that Louis-Philippe was about to elevate an artist to the peerage; see Shelton, `Making History,' op. cit. (note 6), pp. 23945. On Ingres's histrionic reaction to the negative criticism generated by Saint Symphorien, see Andrew Carrington Shelton, `Un Sejour ignore d'Ingres sur la cote normande en mars 1834', Bulletin du Musee Ingres, no. 71, 1998, pp. 519. Anonymous, `De la necessite des renouvellements au Salon prochain', L'Artiste, vol. 3, no. 4, 1832, p. 38: `les deux hommes qui dominent aujourd'hui la peinture'; `c'est la lutte du genie antique et du genie moderne. M. Ingres teint par plusieurs cotes aux temps de la Grece heroque; il est peut-etre et plutot sculpteur que peintre; il se preoccupe exclusivement des lignes et des formes, et neglige volontiers l'animation et la couleur [. . .] M. Delacroix, au contraire, sacrifie sans repugance les rigueurs et les exigences du dessin au necessites du drame qu'il compose et qu'il exprime; sa maniere, moins chaste et moins recueillie, plus ardente et plus animee, prefere souvent l'eclat de la couleur a la purete des lignes.' Periodic re-installations of the Salon was a long-standing tradition designed to allow prominent Academic and/or governmentsponsored artists to make a splash with spectacular late entries (Ingres had benefitted from this policy in 1824); the practice was suppressed under Louis-Philippe as being undemocratic. T. Thore, `Des envois de Rome', L'Artiste, ser. 2, vol. 1, no. 26, 1838, p. 377: `D'un cote, la severite de la ligne, la secheresse du modele, la sobriete de la couleur, le calme de la composition; de l'autre cote, la fougue de la pratique, l'eclat de la lumiere, la verve de l'invention, l'inquietude de la nouveaute, l'elan des passions contemporaines.' The fundamental study of this conflict remains Bernard Teyssedre, Roger de Piles et les debats sur le colouris au siecle de Louis XIV, Paris, 1957. For a more recent, theoretically informed discussion, see Jacqueline Lichtenstein, The Eloquence of Color: Rhetoric and Painting in the French Classical Age, trans. Emily McVarish, Berkeley, 1993, especially pp. 13868. Louis de Lomenie, `M. Ingres', Galerie des contemporains illustres par un homme de rien, vol. 2, Paris, 1840, p. 7: `C'est l'antagonisme

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INGRES VERSUS DELACROIX eternel de l'esprit et de la chair, de l'ideal et du reel, du dogme et du fait; il existe aussi bien entre Platon et Epicure, Lamartine et Horace, Montesquieu et Bentham, qu'entre l'Ecole romaine et l'Ecole flamande, Raphael et Rubens, M. Ingres and M. Delacroix' (emphasis added). See also Charles Blanc, `La Stratonice de M. Ingres', Revue du Progres, ser. 2, vol. 2, no. 4, November 1840, pp. 2923, where Ingres and Delacroix are likewise regarded as representatives of `deux ecoles biens tranchees' that have always existed `les dessinateurs et les couleuristes'. See, for instance, Thenot, `Revue des beaux-arts. Peintures de l'Eglise Saint-Vincent-de-Paul. M. Ingres', Echo de la litterature et des beaux-arts, 30 July 1845, pp. 22832, and Anonymous, `Eglise de Saint-Merry Chapelles de MM. Amaury-Duval et Lehmann', Le Charivari, 16 September 1845 (two assessments of the relative merits of Ingres and Delacroix as monumental decorative painters prompted by the controversial commissioning of Ingres to decorate the newly erected church of Saint-Vincent-de-Paul). See, for instance, Theophile Gautier, Les Beaux Arts en Europe, Paris, 1855, p. 169, where Delacroix is identified as the unrivalled leader of the Romantic school `peut-etre un peu malgre lui'. On the artist's own ambivalence over this status, see Barthelemy Jobert, Delacroix, trans. Terry Grabar and Alexandra Bonfante-Warren, Princeton, 1998, p. 92. This project and the critical responses it elicited are discussed in Johnson, Paintings of Delacroix, vol. 5, 1989, pp. 13342, and Shelton, `Making History,' op. cit. (note 6), pp. 44476. I have argued elsewhere that Ingres's decision to unveil the centrepiece of his decoration, a vast ceiling painting representing The Apotheosis of Napoleon I, in his studio as opposed to the Hotel-de-Ville, worked to frustrate attempts to strike comparisons between his painting and those of other artists; see Shelton, `Making History,' op. cit. (note 6), pp. 45356. This ruse was only partially successful, however, as many important critics insisted on reviewing the contributions of Ingres and Delacroix together; see, for instance, Gustave Planche, `L'Apotheose de Napoleon et le Salon de la Paix. Les deux ecoles de peinture a l'Hotel-de-ville', Revue des deux mondes, new per., ser. 2, vol. 6, part 1, 15 April 1854, pp. 305321; and A.J. Du Pays, `Decorations de l'Hotel-de-ville. Plafond de M. E. Delacroix Plafond de M. Ingres', L'Illustration, vol. 23, no. 583, 29 April 1854, pp. 2678. As a condition for participating in the Exposition universelle, Ingres, who had not presented any works at an official exhibition since 1834, demanded the prerogative of selecting and arranging his pictures in an isolated section of the Palais des Beaux-Arts. He was eventually granted a separate gallery in which he displayed a total of 69 paintings. Delacroix, who was initially unaware of the extraordinary prerogative extended his rival as well as to Horace Vernet, who was likewise granted his own gallery but who, unlike Ingres, magnanimously allowed other artists to exhibit there as well had to settle for grouping his 35 pictures at one end of a communal gallery. On the machinations leading up to the exhibition, see Mainardi, Art and Politics, op. cit. (note 1), pp. 3965, and Shelton, `Making History', op. cit. (note 6), pp. 47682. A list of reviews of the 1855 Exposition universelle which feature comparisons on the two artists is far too long to enumerate here; for a comprehensive list of critical responses to the exhibition, see Christopher Parsons and Martha Ward, A Bibliography of Salon Criticism in Second Empire Paris, Cambridge, 1986, pp. 2537. Claude Vignon [Noemie Cadiot], Exposition universelle de 1855: Beaux-Arts (Paris, 1955), p. 184: `les differences qui separent ces Messieurs sont cent fois connues; leurs tendances reciproques ont ete mille fois comparees, appreciees, discutees.' All three critics wrote at some length on the Ingres/Delacroix dichotomy but in ways that added little to the standard assessments that were constantly repeated elsewhere in the press. Despite some interesting riffs on the two artists, Gautier, who was more or less equally enthusiastic about them both, never really challenged the line-versus-colour foundation of their rivalry; see, for instance, Gautier, Les Beaux-Arts en Europe, op. cit. (note 17), vol. 1, pp. 14292. I have already quoted Thore's stereotypical formulation of the antagonism between the two artists in 1838 (see above pp. 732); later in 1846, he attempted to complicate things a bit by claiming that Ingres, as an uncompromising proponent of l'art pour l'art, was the real Romantic, whereas Delacroix deserved to be considered the rightful heir to the Davidian tradition of a politically engaged art; see T. Thore, Salon de 1846, Paris, 1846, pp. 416. Baudelaire, who hated but was nevertheless enthralled by Ingres, indicted the lifelessness and general irrelevance of his art while exonerating him of such platitudinous charges as disdaining colour; Delacroix was, of course, the very embodiment of Romantic genius for the critic. See Charles Baudelaire, `Le Musee classique du bazar Bonne-Nouvelle' (on Ingres's colour), and Charles Baudelaire, `Exposition Universelle' (on Ingres and Delacroix more generally), in Charles Baudelaire, Curiosites esthetiques, Paris, 1990, pp. 924 and 22240. Louis Enault, `Palais des Beaux-Arts', La Presse litteraire, 25 May 1855, p. 418. Eugene de Mirecourt, Les Contemporains: Ingres, Paris, 1856, pp. 334. Alberic Second, La Comedie parisenne, 11 January 1857, p. 221.

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INGRES VERSUS DELACROIX 27 The unsubstantiated anecdotal evidence aside, it is clear that the two artists genuinely disliked one another. Delacroix's famous journal and voluminous correspondence is peppered with references to Ingres, almost all of them disparaging; see Andre Joubin (ed.), Journal de Eugene Delacroix, 3 vols, Paris, 193132 and Andre Joubin (ed.), Correspondance generale de Eugene Delacroix, 5 vols, Paris, 193638 (references to Ingres can be found by consulting the indices in both works). I know of only two direct references to Delacroix in Ingres's published correspondence. In a letter to an unnamed addressee in 1855 the artist explodes with indignation at having been placed on the same level as `l'apotre du laid' by the awards jury of the Exposition universelle, who had voted to bestow upon Ingres and Delacroix (along with eight other artists) identical Grand Medals of Honour; see Charles Blanc, Ingres, sa vie et ses oeuvre, Paris, 1870, p. 183. Similarly, in a letter to the engraver Luigi Calamatta dated 10 January 1857, Ingres refers to Delacroix's latest candidacy for an academic fauteuil as `la fatale nomination a l'institut'. Only nine days earlier he had received a brief but perfectly cordial note from Delacroix excusing himself from paying the customary visit to solicit his vote because of a lingering illness. See Daniel Ternois, `Lettres d'Ingres a Calamatta', Actes du colloque international Ingres et son influence, Montauban, 1980, p. 93, and, for Delacroix's letter, Joubin, Correspondance, op. cit. (note 27), vol. 3, p. 354. 28 The history of the evolution of the concept of celebrity in nineteenth-century France has yet to be written. I have relied on the informative but general account in Leo Braudy, The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and Its History, New York and Oxford, 1986, pp. 390491. The rapid expansion of the print media during the July Monarchy is abundantly documented; for a sample of the most recent research, see the relevant essays in Dean de la Motte and Jeannene M. Przyblyski (eds), Making the News: Modernity and the Mass Press in Nineteenth-Century France, Amherst, 1999, with references to earlier literature. 29 On the history of the Salons caricaturaux see Thierry Chabanne, Les Salons caricaturaux, Les Dossiers du Musee d'Orsay, no. 41, Paris, 1990. 30 Monsieur Ingres himself was a favourite target of the caricaturists; see Genevieve and Jean Lacambre, `Ingres et la critique satirique', Bulletin du Musee Ingres, no. 21, July 1967, pp. 215. 31 That Delaroche and other like-minded artists were widely considered representative of an essentially gutless, conciliatory artistic juste milieu in the 1830s and 1840s is beyond dispute; whether or not this category continues to provide a legitimate framework for the historical analysis of the art of the July Monarchy is, however, the subject of considerable debate; see Michael Marrinan, `The Modernity of Middleness: Rethinking the Juste Milieu', Porticus, 12/13, 198990, pp. 4263. 32 Arnold Hauser, The Social History of Art, 3rd edn, London, 1999, vol. 3, pp. 17386. 33 By 1850 the following works by Delacroix were on permanent display in public collections in and around Paris: at the museum of contemporary art in the Luxembourg Dante and Virgil (Paris, Musee du Louvre; purchased by Louis XVIII from the 1822 Salon), Massacre at Chios (Paris, Musee du Louvre; purchased by Charles X from the 1824 Salon), Women of Algiers (Paris, Musee du Louvre; purchased by Louis-Philippe from the 1834 Salon), Jewish Wedding (Paris, Musee du Louvre; purchased by the Duc d'Orleans and presented as a gift to the Luxembourg); in Paris churches Christ in the Garden of Olives (Eglise Saint-Paul-Saint-Louis, commissioned by the Prefect of the Seine in 1824), The Lamentation (Eglise Saint-Denis du Saint-Sacrement, commissioned by the Prefect of the Seine in 1840); at Versailles The Battle of Taillebourg (Versailles, Musee national du chateau; commissioned by Louis-Philippe in 1834), Entry of the Crusaders into Constantinople (Paris, Musee du Louvre; commissioned by Louis Philippe in 1838 for the Salle des croisades). In addition, by 1850 Delacroix had completed major decorative cycles in the Salon du roi and the library of the Palais Bourbon as well as in the library of the Palais du Luxembourg. During the same period, only four works by Ingres were on permanent display in public collections in Paris: at the Luxembourg Roger Freeing Angelica (Paris, Musee du Louvre; commissioned by Louis XVIII for the Throne Room at Versailles in 1817), Christ Giving the Keys of Heaven to St Peter (Montauban, Musee Ingres; transferred from the Church of San Trinita dei Monti in Rome to the Luxembourg in 1841), Cherubini and the Muse of Lyric Poetry (Paris, Musee du Louvre; purchased by Louis-Philippe in 1842); in the Chapelle de la Compassion-Saint Ferdinand Portrait of the Duc d'Orleans (Versailles, Musee national du chateau; commissioned by the state in 1843). Although Ingres had been offered a string of prestigious decorative commissions, he managed to complete only two: that for room number 9 in the Louvre's Musee Charles X (featuring The Apotheosis of Homer) and the designs for the stained-glass windows in the Chapelle de la Compassion-Saint Ferdinand. 34 In was in response to Ingres's retrospective displays on the Boulevard Bonne-Nouvelle in 1846 and at the Exposition universelle in 1855 that his particular expertise as a portraitist and painter of the female nude began to dominate the critical discussion of the artist; see Shelton, `Making History', op. cit. (note 6), pp. 36781 and 5225.

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INGRES VERSUS DELACROIX 35 See Louis Hautecoeur, `Delacroix et l'Academie des beaux-arts', Gazette des beaux-arts, per. 6, vol. 62, no. 1139, December 1963, pp. 3512. 36 See Maurice Agulhon, The Republican Experiment, 18481852, trans. Janet Lloyd, Cambridge, 1983, especially pp. 2248. 37 `Republique des arts. Duel a outrance entre M. Ingres, le Thiers de la ligne, et M. Delacroix, le Proudhon de la couleur. Il n'y a point quartier a esperer; si M. Ingres triomphe, la couleur sera proscrite sur toute la ligne, et l'insurge que l'on trouverait muni de la moindre vessie sera livre aux derniers supplices. Si Delacroix est vainqueur, on interdira la ligne avec tant de rigueur que les gens surpris a pecher a la ligne sous le Pont-Neuf seront immediatement passes par les armes. Quelques personnes ont bien ose parler de fusion entre la ligne et la couleur; mais ce projet a paru si ridicule et si extravagant, que nous n'en parlons ici que pour memoire.' 38 On the activities of Thiers and Proudhon during the Second Republic, see J.P.T. Bury and R.P. Tombs, Thiers (17971877): A Political Life, London, 1986, pp. 101137 and K. Steven Vincent, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and the Rise of French Republican Socialism, New York and Oxford, 1984, pp. 166208. The most famous confrontation between the two politicians occurred on 26 July 1848 when Thiers delivered a withering attack on Proudhon's proposed reconfiguration of the nation's system of credit in order to alleviate the debt of the poor. Following Thiers's speech, Proudhon's bill, which had been portrayed as an assault on private property, was rejected by the overwhelming majority of 691 to 2; see Bury and Tombs, Thiers, op. cit. (note 38), p. 105. 39 On the extremely complex issue of the evolving political associations of classicism and Romanticism in the early nineteenth century, see Hauser, Social History of Art, op. cit. (note 32), vol. 3, pp. 1806. Here it might be appropriate to confirm that, Bertall's caricature aside, the political allegiances of Ingres and Delacroix were virtually identical. Both were centrists who seemed most comfortable with the kind of middle-of-the-road solution epitomized by the constitutional monarchy of Louis-Philippe. Thus, both artists welcomed the revolution of 1830 but were repulsed by that of 1848; see Jobert, Delacroix, op. cit. (note 17), p. 130, and Pierre Angrand, Monsieur Ingres et son epoque, Lausanne, 1967, pp. 749 and 2226. 40 A.J. Du Pays, `Exposition Universelle des beauxarts', L'Illustration, vol. 25, no. 644, 30 June 1855, p. 419: `c'est comme la droite et la gauche des anciennes chambres des deputes.' For a (perhaps slightly over-determined) analysis of the political nature of the reviews of the 1855 Exposition universelle, see Mainardi, Art and Politics, op. cit. (note 1), pp. 7396.

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