Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (French, 1780-1867)
Property from the Collection of Nancy Richardson
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (French, 1780-1867)

Tête de juive

Details
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (French, 1780-1867)
Tête de juive
signed 'Ingres' (lower left)
oil on linen and canvas laid down on panel
8 7/8 x 6 5/8 in. (22.5 x 16.8 cm.)
Provenance
The artist.
Etienne-François Haro (1827-1897) and Henri Haro (1855-1911), his son, acquired directly from the above, 13 October 1866 (but possibly never collected from the artist's studio).
The artist's estate sale, Hôtel Drouot, Paris, 6-7 May 1867, lot 33, as Tête de femme de profil avec une draperie rouge.
M. Haro père et fils sale; Paris, Galerie Sedelmeyer, 30-31 May 1892, lot 114, as Tête de femme de profil avec une draperie rouge.
Edgar Degas (1834-1917), possibly acquired directly from the above.
His sale; Galerie Georges Petit, Paris, 26-27 March 1918, lot 57, as Tête de femme (étude pour Jésus au milieu des docteurs).
with Lefebvre-Foinet, Paris.
Georges Renand (1893-1975), Paris.
His sale; Hôtel Drouot, Paris, 15 March 1988, lot 36.
Ian Woodner (1903-1990) Family Collection, New York.
Anonymous sale; Christie's, New York, 23 May 1991, lot 11, as Portrait of a Jewess.
with Stair Sainty Matthiesen, by 1992.
Acquired from the above by the present owner, 24 June 1992.
Literature
H. Delaborde, Ingres, sa vie, ses travaux, sa doctrine, Paris, 1870, p. 243, no. 96, as Tête de femme, vue de profil, coiffée d'une draperie rouge.
H. Lapauze, Ingres, sa vie & son œuvre (1780-1867), Paris, 1911, p. 552, no. 28.
G. Wildenstein, The Paintings of J. A. D. Ingres, London, 1956, p. 192-193, no. 144, illustrated fig. 85, as Head of a Jewish Woman.
E. Radius and E. Camesasca, L'opera completa di Ingres, Milan, 1968, p. 100, no. 102, illustrated, as Testa di Ebrea.
D. Ternois, Ingres, Milan, 1980, p. 179, no. 145, illustrated.
Exhibited
Paris, Palais de l'École impériale des beaux-arts, Des tableaux, études peintes, dessins et croquis de J.-A.-D. Ingres, 1867, no. 76, as Tête de femme de profil avec une draperie rouge.
Paris, Musée Carnavalet, Chefs-d'œuvre des collections parisiennes : peintures et dessins de l'école française du XIX siècle, December 1952-February 1953, no. 59, as Tête de femme.
New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Private Collection of Edgar Degas, 1 October 1997-11 January 1998, pp. 147-148, illustrated fig. 195, as Head of a Woman.

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.

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