painting

Self Portrait

Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres

About this work

Object details

TitleSelf Portrait
Date1864-1865
Mediumoil on canvas
Measurements64 × 53 cm
Inventory number1526
Inscriptionsupper right: J Ingres peint par lui,/ pour la Celebre Academie/ d'Anvers

More about this work

Since 1853 the French artist Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres had been a extraordinary member of the Academic Corps at Antwerp academy, and in 1857, became a full member after the death of his predecessor Paul Delaroche. In 1860 the academy ordered a painting and a portrait for the Museum of the Academicians. Ingres refused the commission on the grounds that he had too much work on hand, and was old and ill. The Frenchman had evidently not understood that admission to the Academic Corps entailed an obligation to enrich the body’s art collection with two works of his own. The academy insisted that he did so, and Ingres set to work on his self-portrait, which he finished in 1865, when he was 85 years old. He signed demonstratively: ‘J Ingres peint par lui, pour la Celebre Academie d’Anvers’ (J. Ingres, painted by himself, for the celebrated Academy of Antwerp). Ingres saw this as an ideal opportunity not to pose as an artist but as a man of the world, a European celebrity, rich and respected. In 1864 he could look back on a long and successful career, during which he had been showered with fame and honour. He is wearing a smart suit and has a top hat and gloves, ready to go outdoors, but not without his medals: the star of the Grand Officer of the French Legion of Honour, the cross of the Prussian order Pour le Mérite, and the decoration that he received from the Grand Duke of Tuscany. Ingres painted himself as younger, more handsome and thinner than he was in real life. The portrait for the Antwerp academy is a slightly modified version of the self-portrait that he painted in 1859 (Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Cambridge, Mass.) as a companion piece to the portrait of Delphine Ramel, his second wife (Sammlung Oskar Reinhart, Winterthur). Both self-portraits are variants of a portrait that he made in 1858 for the gallery of prominent artists in the Uffizi in Florence. Ingres based those three late paintings on a photograph taken around 1855 in the Paris studio of Gerotwohl and Tanner. It was too late for the second painting, a history piece. The aged Ingres did not succeed in enriching the academicians with another work from his hand. In 1884, years after his death, the museum bought the drawing that he made after the 1817 painting Henri IV playing with his children (KMSKA, inv. no. 1525).