Ingres, Jean-Auguste-Dominique

French painter. A leading neoclassicist, he was a student of Jacques Louis David. He studied and worked in Rome c. 1807–20, where he began the Odalisque series of sensuous female nudes, then went to Florence, and returned to France in 1824. His portraits painted in the 1840s–50s are meticulously detailed and highly polished.

A master draughtsman, he considered drawing ‘the probity of art’, and developed his style – based on the study of Raphael and marked by clarity of line and a cool formality – in fierce opposition to the Romanticism of Eugène Delacroix. His major works, which exercised a profound influence on 19th-century French Academic art, include Roger and Angelica (1819; Louvre, Paris), La Grande Baigneuse (1808; Louvre, Paris), and La Grande Odalisque (1814; Louvre, Paris), and the portraits Madame Moitessier (1856; National Gallery, London) and François Marius (1807; Musée Granet, Aix-en-Provence).