Masters in Art, Part 79, Volume 7, July, 1906: Ingres: A Series of Illustrated Monographs

Published in 1906, when Ingres had only recently passed into history, this illustrated monograph captures a critical moment in French art criticism. The text examines the career of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, the painter who stubbornly championed line and form against the rising tide of Romantic color and emotion led by Delacroix. The book traces his formation under Jacques-Louis David through his masterworks like OEdipus and the Sphinx, La Source, and The Apotheosis of Homer, revealing how Ingres built a deliberate alternative to the artistic revolution happening around him. The commentators, writing just decades after Ingres's death, grapple with his paradox: a revolutionary conservative whose precision and devotion to drawing scandalized his contemporaries while securing his place as the father of modern classicism. This is early twentieth-century art history at its most immediate, still warm from the debates that defined an era. For readers interested in how art movements calcify into history, and how critics shape artistic legacies in real time, this monograph offers a fascinating window into the making of the canon.