Ingres Paintings
1780 - 1867 Painter, Printmaker, Violinist, France, Neoclassicism
Madame Jacques-Louis Leblanc, nee Francoise Poncelle, 1823
Oil on canvas, 47.01 x 36.5 inches [119.4 x 92.7 cm]
Metropolitan Museum of Art, Manhattan Portraits
On the subject of Ingres's sensuality, a number of writers are troubled by the way in which his images of women seem to render them as objets de luxe, whether fashion idols , as in this painting, or almost nude bathers and odalisques; a male 'colonization' of the eroticized female body is assumed. References to Venus, as Robert Rosenblum points out, permeate Ingres's work, not just in the more obvious odalisques and bathers 'whose lives are fully devoted to the arts of love', but also 'their nineteenth-century counterparts, the gallery of modern women whose portraits Ingres painted as if these sitters, too, were sequestered in the pampered confines of an exclusively erotic domain'
