Jean-Auguste Dominique Ingres was a French painter, born in Montauban in 1780 and died in Paris in 1867. Two things keep his name alive: the Grande Odalisque, a reclining nude whose back is far too long, and a French saying.
Ingres also played the violin, and loved it. So French speakers call a hobby loved almost as much as the trade itself "le violon d'Ingres", Ingres's violin.
A pupil of Jacques-Louis David, he spent long years in Italy, first as a young painter and later as director of the French Academy in Rome. He built his reputation on exact drawing, which makes his most famous picture stranger still.
The woman in it lies on a couch and looks back at us over her shoulder, and her back keeps going. For years Paris laughed at pictures like this one, before it honored the man who painted them.
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The boy grew up in Montauban, a town in southwestern France. His father, Joseph Ingres, was a decorative painter and sculptor who also earned money as a musician, and he taught his son both crafts, drawing and music.
At eleven the young Ingres was sent to the art academy in Toulouse, the great city of the region. Between about thirteen and sixteen he also sat as second violin in the orchestra of the Capitole, the opera house of Toulouse. Music, he later said, was the perfume of his life.
The academy gave him his first success. In March 1797 he won its first prize in drawing, and that August he left for Paris to enter the studio of Jacques-Louis David, the leading French painter of the day. He stayed about four years.
In 1801 he won the Prix de Rome, the top prize of the French art schools. Its winners went to study at the French Academy in Rome, paid by the state. But France was at war and the treasury was empty, so there was no money for the journey.
Ingres stayed in Paris for five more years. In 1806, the year he finally left for Rome, he painted the new emperor, Napoleon, and that portrait turned Paris against him.
What You'll Discover
What a critic wrote about his portrait of Napoleon.
What paid his rent in Rome.
Who ordered the reclining nude.
What researchers found when they measured its back.
Who he called the apostle of ugliness.
What he left to his hometown.