Lot Essay
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres was an accomplished and prolific painter and draftsman, a key figure in the neoclassical movement, and one of the 19th century’s most avid interpreters of history and antiquity. A notorious perfectionist and self-editor, Ingres would make numerous studies, both drawings and oil sketches, for his most important compositions. Many of these studies, like Tête de juive, were têtes d’expression, an academic exercise which aided the artist in perfecting the representation of individual emotions. The tender, reverent gaze that Ingres has worked out in the figure in the present work does seem to indicate that this study may have been undertaken for a religious painting. While earlier scholars have suggested that this figure might be a study for the figure of Mary in Ingres’s Christ Among the Doctors, this elegant oil sketch has never been conclusively linked with any one finished composition. The multi-support technique evidenced in Tête de juive is one that recurs regularly in oil sketches by the artist. Ingres would often use small format canvases to work out gestures and facial expressions for his figures. He would then trim out the most successful of these premières pensées and lay them down onto another support so that he could enlarge these smaller studies into more finished compositions, as he has done with the present work.
Tête de juive has a distinguished provenance, having belonged to several important collections, including that of the artist Edgar Degas. Degas revered Ingres, who the younger artist had met in 1855, and voraciously collected his work, eventually owning over twenty of his paintings and ninety of his drawings. Ingres advised Degas when the two met that he should, ‘Draw lines, young man, and still more lines, both from life and from memory, and you will become a good artist,’ advice which the young Degas took to heart. Degas’s large collection of Ingres’s work was a sign of the immense respect that one of the two most important draftsman of the 19th century held for the other.
Tête de juive has a distinguished provenance, having belonged to several important collections, including that of the artist Edgar Degas. Degas revered Ingres, who the younger artist had met in 1855, and voraciously collected his work, eventually owning over twenty of his paintings and ninety of his drawings. Ingres advised Degas when the two met that he should, ‘Draw lines, young man, and still more lines, both from life and from memory, and you will become a good artist,’ advice which the young Degas took to heart. Degas’s large collection of Ingres’s work was a sign of the immense respect that one of the two most important draftsman of the 19th century held for the other.