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Lot Essay
In 1826, on the heels of his critical breakthrough with the Le vœu de Louis XIII, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres received the commission for L'apothéose d'Homère, which was to be a ceiling decoration for the Musée Charles X in the Palais du Louvre. Ingres had recently returned from nearly 20 years away from the French capital, having relocated to Italy in 1806 after winning the Prix de Rome. The work he had sent back to Paris during his time away – a requirement of winners of the prize so that the Academy in Paris could keep track of their progress – had been largely panned, with critics complaining that his art was too backwards looking, his style too flat and airless. In Le vœu de Louis XIII, Ingres experimented with a new style, consciously imitating Raphael, and it was this Renaissance-inspired Classicism which finally brought Ingres the official recognition he had long-sought. Heralded as ‘the essential character of the new style’, Le vœu de Louis XIII led in quick succession to the artist being awarded the Légion d'honneur and elected to the Académie des Beaux-Arts; an official commission from the State was the crowning glory of Ingres’s newly-revived career.
In L'apothéose d'Homère, Ingres, one of the 19th century’s most avid interpreters of history and antiquity, turned again to the example of Raphael. Depicting great figures of art, poetry, music and philosophy from antiquity to modernity surrounding the seated Homer as a winged figure representing either victory or the universe crowns him with a laurel wreath, Ingres drew heavily on Raphael’s Parnassus in his conception of the composition. Though Ingres was a notorious perfectionist and often took years in working out his paintings (Le vœu de Louis XIII had taken the artist some four years), he was given only a year to complete L'apothéose d'Homère as part of the commission, and it was a point of pride for the artist that he had done an initial sketch for the work in about an hour. Still, in spite of this short time frame, Ingres would not compromise his preparatory process, and more than 100 preparatory sketches and oil sketches, the present work among them, survive for this important commission.
An avowed self-editor, Ingres would make numerous studies for his most important compositions, an academic exercise to help him work out the most minute details, particularly focusing on hands, arms, and facial expressions. The multi-support technique evidenced in Deux études de bras pour la figure d'Apelles dans le tableau de 'L'apothéose d'Homère' is one that recurs regularly in oil sketches by the artist. Ingres would often use small format canvases to experiment with gestures and facial expressions for his figures. He would then trim out the most successful of these premières pensées and lay them down on to another support so that he could enlarge his smaller detail studies into more finished studies illustrating a larger area of the planned composition, as he has done with the present work. The addition by the artist at the top of the composition, painting directly on to a strip of unprimed panel to study the neck and lower profile of the figure of Apelles is more unusual, but still entirely in keeping with a working preparatory study by the artist.
While the present study has long been identified as two studies for the arm of Apelles, careful study of the finished composition demonstrates that it actually depicts the arms of two separate figures. The study at left, grasping the hand at lower left, is indeed a study for the figure of the great ancient Greek painter Apelles of Kos, the hand he grasps is that of Raphael, situated behind him in the final composition, both to the left of the figure of Homer. By connecting the two, Ingres was hoping to illustrate that the art of Raphael was directly connected to the art of the ancient world, a lineage that Ingres, conspicuously imitating Raphael in this work, hoped to illustrate himself as part of as well. The arm at right, however, is probably actually a study for the arm of Plato, who can be found to the right of Homer in the final composition. In the finished work, Plato faces toward the viewer as he converses with the figure of Socrates, he is wearing a toga of the same yellow as in the present study (the figure of Apelles, here wearing a mauve toga, is depicted in light blue in the final work). In the final composition, the artist has made some minor changes to Plato’s figure as seen in this work, whereas Apelles is left unchanged. Instead of grasping the paper the philosopher is holding in his proper left hand as in this study, Plato instead holds it in his right, with his left hand grasping the wrist of his right arm.
In L'apothéose d'Homère, Ingres, one of the 19th century’s most avid interpreters of history and antiquity, turned again to the example of Raphael. Depicting great figures of art, poetry, music and philosophy from antiquity to modernity surrounding the seated Homer as a winged figure representing either victory or the universe crowns him with a laurel wreath, Ingres drew heavily on Raphael’s Parnassus in his conception of the composition. Though Ingres was a notorious perfectionist and often took years in working out his paintings (Le vœu de Louis XIII had taken the artist some four years), he was given only a year to complete L'apothéose d'Homère as part of the commission, and it was a point of pride for the artist that he had done an initial sketch for the work in about an hour. Still, in spite of this short time frame, Ingres would not compromise his preparatory process, and more than 100 preparatory sketches and oil sketches, the present work among them, survive for this important commission.
An avowed self-editor, Ingres would make numerous studies for his most important compositions, an academic exercise to help him work out the most minute details, particularly focusing on hands, arms, and facial expressions. The multi-support technique evidenced in Deux études de bras pour la figure d'Apelles dans le tableau de 'L'apothéose d'Homère' is one that recurs regularly in oil sketches by the artist. Ingres would often use small format canvases to experiment with gestures and facial expressions for his figures. He would then trim out the most successful of these premières pensées and lay them down on to another support so that he could enlarge his smaller detail studies into more finished studies illustrating a larger area of the planned composition, as he has done with the present work. The addition by the artist at the top of the composition, painting directly on to a strip of unprimed panel to study the neck and lower profile of the figure of Apelles is more unusual, but still entirely in keeping with a working preparatory study by the artist.
While the present study has long been identified as two studies for the arm of Apelles, careful study of the finished composition demonstrates that it actually depicts the arms of two separate figures. The study at left, grasping the hand at lower left, is indeed a study for the figure of the great ancient Greek painter Apelles of Kos, the hand he grasps is that of Raphael, situated behind him in the final composition, both to the left of the figure of Homer. By connecting the two, Ingres was hoping to illustrate that the art of Raphael was directly connected to the art of the ancient world, a lineage that Ingres, conspicuously imitating Raphael in this work, hoped to illustrate himself as part of as well. The arm at right, however, is probably actually a study for the arm of Plato, who can be found to the right of Homer in the final composition. In the finished work, Plato faces toward the viewer as he converses with the figure of Socrates, he is wearing a toga of the same yellow as in the present study (the figure of Apelles, here wearing a mauve toga, is depicted in light blue in the final work). In the final composition, the artist has made some minor changes to Plato’s figure as seen in this work, whereas Apelles is left unchanged. Instead of grasping the paper the philosopher is holding in his proper left hand as in this study, Plato instead holds it in his right, with his left hand grasping the wrist of his right arm.