Portrait of Monsieur Bertin

Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, Portrait of Monsieur Bertin, 1832. 116.2cm x 94.9cm (45.75in x 37.375in). Musée du Louvre

Portrait of Monsieur Bertin is a 1832 oil on canvas painting by the French artist Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. It shows Louis-François Bertin, the writer, art collector and director of the pro-royalist Journal des débats. Bertin was a friend and patron of the artist, and a politically active member of the French upper-middle class. In this work he embodies the confident and commercially minded men of the liberal reign of Louis Philippe I. The portrait was completed as Ingres was experiencing his first success; but as a portraitist, not as the history painter he aspired to be. He regarded commissioned portraits as distractions from more important work, but reluctantly accepted them. As with most of Ingres' best known portraits, Bertin's had a prolonged genesis; the artist agonised in his search for a satisfactory pose.

Bertin is shown in three-quarter profile on a brown ground lit from the right. He is seated on a chair which contains a reflection from an unseen window. He is presented as a restless force of nature; his bulk seemingly spills out of the canvas. Yet the work is an unflinching realistic depiction of the effects of aging. Ingres focuses on the impact of time and pressures of life on Bertin's appearance. These are most noticeable in the deep furrows of his skin and his thinning hair, but counteracted by the resolve and determination of his expression.

The portrait became an instant and enduring critical and popular success. It was highly praised when exhibited at the Salon in 1833, and has influenced both academic painters, such as Léon Bonnat, and modernist artists like Edgar Degas and Pablo Picasso. Today it is regarded as Ingres' finest male portrait, one of his most important and influential paintings. It has been in the Musée du Louvre since 1897.

Background

Ingres' early career concided with the Romantic movement's reaction against the then neoclassical style of art to which the artist aspired; a period in French art that had developed when artists saw themselves as part of the cultural center of Europe, and France the successor to Rome. Romantic painting was freer and more expressive, preoccupied more with with colour than line or form, more focused on style than subject matter. Paintings based on classical themes fell out of fashion, replaced by concern for the holistic form of the work, and contemporary rather than historical subject matter, especially in portraits. Ingres resisted this move, and wrote, "The history painter shows the species in general; while the portrait painter represents only the specific individual—a model often ordinary and full of shortcomings."

As a struggling young artist, Ingres' income depended on commissioned portraits, a genre he despised as lacking in grandeur. He agreed to a number of portraits which brought him the renown that had previously eluded him. By the 1830s he was an acclaimed and much sought-after portraitist, his early financial difficulties behind him. He could afford to accept only a few commissions and concentrate on historical subject matter. He wrote in 1847, "Damned portraits, they are so difficult to do that they prevent me getting on with greater things that I could do more quickly".

With the Bertin commission, Ingres was sufficiently moved by the subject's strong personality to accept the undertaking. Bertin, who was 66 when the portrait was complete, probably came into contact with Ingres via his son Édouard Bertin, a student of the painter from 1827 or the art critic on the Journal, Ingres' friend Étienne-Jean Delécluze. He was a leader of the French upper class and a supporter of Louis-Philippe. Backed by the Bourbon Restoration, Bertin directed the Moniteur until 1823, when the Journal des débats became the recognised organ of the liberal-constitutional opposition after he had come to criticize absolutism. Bertin gave his support however, in the end, to the July Monarchy.

Preparation and execution

1832 study on black charcoal and graphite on paper. Musée Ingres, Montauban

Ingres was a self-demanding and self-critical artist. He was consumed with self-doubt, and often took months to complete a portrait, with large gaps of inactivity between sittings. He agonised in finding a pose for Bertin that would best convey the man's restless energy and age. Ingres was frustrated by his inability to do so, and eventually broke down in tears in his studio. Bertin recalled, "I would spend my time in consoling him: 'my dear Ingres, don't bother about me; and above all don't torment yourself like that. You want to start my portrait over again? Take your own time for it. You will never tire me, and just as long as you want me to come, I am at your orders.'"

Study, 1832, Louvre. This is the first drawing to show the eventual pose, though the sitter's bulk has not yet been filled out

A preparatory study shows Bertin standing with his hand leaning on a table, in an almost Napoleonic pose. Bertin's hard, level stare is already established, but focus of the image seems to be on his groin rather than face. This was intended to show that France was in the control of bourgeoisie business men. There is a more personal and subtle idea in the final pose; Ingres reverses the role of artist and sitter. He becomes the cool, detached observer, while Bertin, usually the calm and reasoned—almost motherly—patron of the arts, is restless and impatient, a mirror of Ingres' irritation at spending time on portraiture when he could be exploring classical themes.

Ingres' early biographers provide differing anecdotes regarding the inspiration for the distinctive seated pose. Henri Delaborde said Ingres observed Bertin in this posture while arguing politics after dinner with his sons. In a story Eugène Emmanuel Amaury Duval said was related to him by Bertin, Ingres noticed a pose Bertin took while seated outside with Ingres and a third man at a café. According to Bertin, Ingres "came close and speaking almost in my ear said: 'Come sit tomorrow, your portrait is done.'" The final work was completed within a month.

Description

Bertin leans slightly forward, and is both a paternal and imposing, confrontational figure. He fixes the viewer with a hard, but ironic stare. He appears poised to speak, his body fully towards the viewer, his facial expression etched with certainty. Perhaps influenced by Nicolas Poussin's 1650 Self-Portrait with Allegory of Painting, Ingres minutely details the veins and wrinkles of his face. He is shown in three-quarter profile against a gold–brown background lit from the right. He rests on a urved-back mahogany chair, the arms of which reflect light from the upper left of the canvas. He has strong features and an energetic but warm-hearted expression. His hair is grey or nearly white, his fingers spread across his knees. The fingers were described in 1959 by artist Henry de Waroquier as those "crablike claws...emerging from the tenebrous caverns that are the sleeves of his coat."

Study of the sitter's right hand. Graphite on tracing paper. Fogg Museum, Harvard, MA

The bulk of Bertin's body is stuffed within a tight black jacket, black trousers and brown satin waistcoat, with a starched white shirt and cravat revealing his open neck. He wears a gold watch and has a pair of glasses in his right pocket. In the view of art critic Robert Rosenblum, his "nearly ferocious presence" is accentuated by the apparently constrained space he occupies. His chair and clothes appear almost too small to contain him. His coiled, stubby fingers rest on his thighs and barely protrude from the sleeves of his jacket, while his neck cannot be seen above his narrow starched white collar. The Greek meander pattern at the bottom of the wall seems unusually close to the picture plane, confining him further. The wall is painted in an abstract gold, which according to critic Robert Lubar adds to the sense of a monumental portrait of a modern icon.

The painting is highly symmetrical and divides horizontally. The most obvious marker of symmetry is his mouth, which turns downwards at the left and upwards at the right. This break in expression is intended to show the duality of his personality: on the one hand a hard-nosed businessman, on the other a liberal patron of the arts. His heavily lidded eyes are circled by the oppositely curled rounded twists of his white collar, and the twists of his hair, eyebrows and eyelids.

Ingres later added the window reflection on the rim of Bertin's chair. It is a barely discernible detail, but in its reduced size gives depth to the painting. The work has been identified as a direct reference to Raphael's c. 1519 Portrait of Pope Leo X, in which a window is reflected in the gilded pommel of the pope's chair.

Raphael, Portrait of Pope Leo X, c. 1519. Uffizi, Florence

The portrait is predominately in black, gray and browns colours, excepting the white collar and sleeves, a single patch of sharp red in the seat cushion, and the reddish light falling on the leather of the chair. In 19th-century art and fashion, colour was associated with femininity and emotion; male portraiture tended towards muted shades and monochrome. Ingres' female portraits tend to show the sitter in a relaxed pose, dressed in and surrounded by splendour. By convention, a female portrait was for men to gaze upon: "without moral mystery, it awaits, like a white page, until the sensibility of a man inscribes his dream upon it. It is a permanent spectacle, open, like a landscape to admiration." Ingres' 1814 Portrait of Madame de Senonnes was described as "to the feminine what the Louvre's Bertin is to the masculine" The sitter in Ingres' 1848 Portrait of Baronne de Rothschild looks out at the viewer with almost the same directness as Bertin, but the image is softened by the attractiveness of her dress and relaxed pose; she is presented as engaging and sympathetic rather than tough and imposing. In contrast, Bertin is upright and alert. The subdued colours draw the viewer to examine his face and character, as he is presented as the "epitome of modern masculinity."

Ingres was probably influenced by Hans Holbein's 1527 Portrait of William Warham, which he could have seen in the Louvre. Neither artist placed much emphasis on colour, preferring dark or cool tones. The Warham portrait may have informed Ingres' in its depiction of aging, and emphasis on the finely detailed fingers.

The frame is the origional, and thought to have been designed by Ingres himself. It shows a number of animals around a sinuous and richly carved grapevine. Art historians such as Paul Mitchell and Lynn Roberts note that the design follows an old French tradition of placing "austere" male portraits within "exuberantly carved" frames. The frame closely resembles that of Raphel's c. 1514–15 Portrait of Baldassare Castiglione, a painting that influeced Ingres', espically in colour tone. It is signed, in capital text, J.Ingres Pinxit 1832 at top left, with L.F. Bertin, also in capitals, at the top right.

Reception

Illustration from the Journal des Débats, 1840-1850's

Portrait of Monsieur Bertin was first exhibited at the 1833 Salon alongside his 1807 Portrait of Mme Devauçay. It met with near universal praise, becoming his most successful artwork to that point. It sealed his reputation as a portraitist; then as today it is considered his greatest male portrait. Ingres viewed this as a mixed blessing and later remarked, "Since my portraits of Bertin and Molé, everybody wants portraits. There are six that I've turned down, or am avoiding, because I can't stand them." Before the exhibition he was apprehensive, admitting that he feared "people will find the colouring a bit dreary".

The work's almost photographic realism inspired much commentary when the painting was first exhibited. Some saw it as an affront to Romanticism, others that its small details only to showed an acute likeness, but built a psychological profile of the sitter. Art historian Geraldine Pelles sees Bertin as "at once intense, suspicious, and aggressive". She notes that there is a certain amount of projection of the artist's own personality at play, and recalls Théophile Silvestre's description of Ingres; "There he was squarely seated in an armchair, motionless as an Egyptian god carved of granite, his hands stretched wide over parallel knees, his torso stiff, his head haughty".

Critics compared the portrait to the work of Balthasar Denner, a German realist painter heavily influenced by Jan van Eyck's forensic attention to detail. The comparison was indented by some as flattering and dismissive by others. Denner, in the words of Ingres scholar Robert Rosenblum, "specialised in recording every last line on the faces of aged men and women, and even reflections of windows in their eyes." At the time, Louis de Maynard, of the Collège-lycée Ampère, wrote in the influential L'Europe littéraire, that Denner was a weak painter anyway, interested in hyperrealistic "curiosities", and that both he and Ingres' fell short of the "sublime productions of Ingres self-proclaimed hero, Raphel."

Unknown artist, M. Betin le-Veau. Parody published in Le Charivari, 1833

Several critics remarked upon the depiction of Bertin's hands. Félix Tournachon, known as Nadar, was harshly critical of the portrait, and of Ingres' distortions in depicting Bertin's right hand: he wrote of "this fantastical bundle of flesh...under which, instead of bones and muscles, there can only be intestines- this flatulent hand, the rumbling of which I can hear!" Bertin's hands made a different impression on the critic F. de Lagenevais, who remarked: "A mediocre artist would have modified them, he would have replaced those swollen joints with the cylindrical fingers of the first handy model; but by this single alteration he would have changed the expression of the whole personality ... the energetic and mighty nature".

The painting's reception had social and politicals dimensions, related the standings of both sitter and artist. A number of critics mentioned Bertin's eventful career, in tones that were, according to art historian Andrew Carrington Shelton either "bitingly scarastic and fawingly reverential". There were many satirical reproductions and pointed editorials. Aware of Bertin's support of the July Monarchy, the La Gazette de France saw the portrait as the epitome of the "oppurtunism and cynisim" or the new regime. Their anonymous critic excitedly wondered "what bitter irony it expresses, what hardened sceptism, scarcsm and...pronounced cynicism".

Bertin's wife Louis-Marie reportedly did not like the painting, while his daughter Louise said that it transformed her father from a "great lord" to a "fat farmer".

Influence

Pablo Picasso, Portrait of Gertrude Stein, 1906

Due to a changing political climate and an intellectual move away from academic art, Ingres' portrait came to represent the old guard for the following generation of artists. Its overwhelming masculinity, conveyed through the full frontal pose, sobriety, and close attention to the details of the sitter's face, skin and hair are in marked contrast to the then conventional portrayal of women, exemplified by Ingres' portrait of Mademoiselle Caroline Rivière. At the time, the newer guard of French portraits of women tended towards dreamy, soft focus and corporeal depictions.

Léon Bonnat, Portrait of Ernest Renan, 1892

However the painting has been influential. Léon Bonnat' 1892 portrait of the aging Ernest Renan has been described as a "direct citation" of Ingres' portrait, while the influence of the Bertin portrait can be seen in the dismissive stare and overwhelming physical presence of the sitter in Pablo Picasso's 1906 Portrait of Gertrude Stein.

Provenance

Bertin bequeathed the portrait to his daughter Louise (1805-1877) on his death. She passed it to her niece Marie-Louise-Sophie Bertin (1836–93), who married Jules Bapst, also a director of the Journal des débats. Their niece Cécile Bapst was its last private owner. She sold it to the Musée du Louvre for 80,000 francs in 1897.

References

Bibliography

• Boime, Albert. Art in an age of counterrevolution, 1815-1848. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. ISBN 0-2260-6337-9
• Burroughs, Louise. "Drawings by Ingres". The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, volume 4, no. 6, 1946
• Carrington Shelton, Andrew. Ingres and His Critics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. ISBN 0-5218-4243-3
• Carrington Shelton, Andrew. In: Tinterow, Gary (ed); Conisbee, Philip (ed). Portraits by Ingres: Image of an Epoch. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1998. ISBN 0-3000-8653-9
• Cohn, Marjorie; Siegfried, Susan. Works by J.-A.-D. Ingres in the collection of the Fogg Art Museum. Cambridge, MA: Fogg Art Museum, Harvard Univ. 1980. OCLC 6762670
• Garb, Tamar. The Painted Face, Portraits of Women in France, 1814–1914. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007. ISBN 0-3001-1118-7
• Jover, Manuel. Ingres. Bologna: Terrail, 2005. ISBN 2-87939-289-6
• Pach, Walter. Ingres. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1939
• Pelles, Geraldine. Art, Artists and Society: Origins of a Modern Dilemma; Painting in England and France, 1750–1850. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1963
• Pomarède, Vincent (ed). Ingres : 1780-1867. Paris: Gallimard, 2006. ISBN 2-0701-1843-6
• Rifkin, Adrian. Ingres: Then and Now. New York: Routledge, 2000
• Rosenblum, Robert. Ingres. London: Harry N. Abrams, 1990. ISBN 0-3000-8653-9
• Siegfried, Susan; Rifkin, Adrian. Fingering Ingres. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2001. ISBN 0-6312-2526-9
• Toussaint, Hélène. "Les Portraits d'Ingres: peintures des musées nationaux". Réunion des musées nationaux, 1985. ISBN 2-7118-0298-1
• Zamoyski, Adam. 1812, Napoleon's Fatal March on Moscow. London: Harper Perennial, 2005. ISBN 0-0071-2374-4

Further reading

• Carrington, Shelton Andrew. "Image of an epoch". In: Portraits by Ingres, catalogue d'exposition, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The National Gallery, London, 1999. 300-307
• Naef, Hans. Die Bildniszeichnungen von J.A.D. Ingres. Benteli Verlag Bern, volume III, 1979. 114–135
• Ternois, Daniel. Ingres: Le portrait de monsieur Bertin. Réunion des Musées Nationaux collection, solo, 1998. ISBN 2-7118-3749-1
• Ternois, Daniel. Monsieur Bertin, Collection 'Solo'. Paris: Louvre Service Culturel, 1998. ISBN 2-7118-3749-1

External links

• Louis-François Bertin; at the Musée du Louvre