Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Notes and Thoughts on Art

Robert Goldwater and Marco Treves, Artists on Art from the XIV to the XX Century, (New York, Pantheon Books, 1945), pp. 215-216, 218-219. XX

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres was one of the most influential painters of the first half of the 19th century. His comments on art shaped the ideas of man French artists and critics for the rest of the century. Here are some of his views.

ART AND THE BEAUTIFUL

There are not two arts, there is only one: it is the one which has as its foundation the beautiful, which is eternal and natural. Those who  seek elsewhere deceive themselves, and in the most fatal manner.  What do those so-called artists mean when they preach the discovery of the "new"?  Is there anything new? Everything has been done, everything has been discovered. Our task is not to invent but to continue, and we have enough to do if, following the examples of the masters, we utilize those innumerable types which nature constantly offers to us, if we interpret them with wholehearted sincerity and ennoble them through that pure and firm style without which no work  has beauty.

STUDY THE ANTIQUE

To claim that we can get along without study of the antique [i.e. the works of the past] and the classics [i.e the products of ancient Greece and Rome] is either madness or laziness. Yes, anti-classic art, if one may even call it an art, is nothing but an art of the lazy. It is the  doctrine of those who want to produce without having worked, who want  to know without  having learned; it is an art as lacking in faith as in discipline, wandering  blindly because of its having no light in the darkness, and demanding that mere chance lead it through places where one can advance only by means of courage, experience, and reflection.

ART, NATURE, AND FASHION

Let me hear no more of that absurd maxim: "We need the new, we need to follow our century, everything changes, everything  is changed." Sophistry -- all of that! Does nature change, do the light and air change, have the passions of the human heart changed since the time of Homer?  "We must follow our century": but suppose my century is wrong. Because my neighbor does evil, am I therefore obliged to do it also? Because virtue, as also beauty, can be misunderstood by you, have I in turn got to misunderstand it? Shall I be compelled to imitate you!