Jean Auguste D Ingres (1780-1867)

Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres was a French Neoclassical painter. Although he considered himself to be a painter of history in the tradition of Nicolas Poussin and Jacques-Louis David, it is Ingres’s portraits, both painted and drawn, that are recognized as his greatest legacy. 

Ingres was profoundly influenced by past artistic traditions, and aspired to become the guardian of academic orthodoxy against the ascendant Romantic style, exemplified by Eugène Delacroix.

His expressive distortions of form and space made him an important precursor of modern art, influencing Picasso, Matisse and other modernists.