Ingres Quotes

He [Renoir] is a subtle and brilliant draughtsman.... all these preliminary drawings [in Renoir's studio] would astonish the public who obviously imagine the 'Impressionists' work at tremendous speed. I don't believe one can go further [in making sketches as studies] than this in the study of form in a drawing. I am charmed by his 'Nude Bathers' quite as much as those by Ingres. He [Renoir] tells me that he thinks the nude is absolutely indispensable as an art form. (Berthe Morisot)

The ones [compliments] I value most came from Edgar Degas who said he was happy to see my work becoming more and more pure. The etcher Bracquemond, a pupil of Ingres, said - possibly he meant what he said - that my work shows increasing strength. I will calmly tread the path I have taken, and try to do my best. At bottom, I have only a vague sense of its rightness or wrongness. I am much disturbed by my unpolished and rough execution. I should like to develop a smoother technique which, while retaining the old fierceness, would be rid of those jarring notes which make it difficult to see my canvases clearly except when the light falls in front. There lies the difficulty - not to speak of drawing.

Camille Pissarro

[the Cubist painters who].. continued to paint objects motionless, frozen, and all the static aspects of Nature; they worship the traditionalism of w:Poussin, of w:Ingres, of Corot, ageing and petrifying their art with an obstinate attachment to the past, which to our eyes remains totally incomprehensible.

Umberto Boccioni

I wanted to proclaim a return to simplicity by ways of an immediate art without any subtlety, comprehensible to all. I love Louis David, because he is so anti-impressionist.. .I love the dryness in his work and also in that of Ingres. That was my way, and it touched me, instantly.

Fernand Léger

It is true – is it not – that even Ingres [French classical painter, famous for his line] had to revise – yes, the surface of the painting is smooth, finished and incorruptible as a diamond, but under the accomplished surface are pentimenti – see there at the shoulder, how the line of the black dress was lowered qua fraction and the hand was extended to give greater elegance... Are these not signs of the patient revision that even a genius has to make.

Arshile Gorky

I like the heat the tenderness the edible the lusciousness the song of a single person the bathtub full of water to bathe myself beneath the water. I like Ucello, Grunewald, Ingres, the drawings and sketches for paintings of Seurat and that man [=Pablo Picasso ]. I measure all things by weight.

Arshile Gorky

The truth lies somewhere between these two aesthetics [static Cubism and dynamic Futurism]. The 'pure form' of w:Ingres led inevitably to a life-less Platonism; the lyricism and Romanticism of Eugène Delacroix no longer tailed with our cerebral and geometric age.... as in all great ages, today's artwork must be the synthesis of these two things.

Gino Severini

Nearly conscious in someone like Michelangelo, or Paolo Uccello, quite intuitive in painters such as Ingres, or Corot, it works on the basis of numbers which belong to the painting itself, not to whatever it represents.

Jean Metzinger

Yes, yes, a formula that's a straitjacket.... not for me! All the same, he tries in vain, does Jean-Dominique [Ingres], to wring your heart with his glossy finish! I said this to Vollard, to shock him, he is very powerful! Nevertheless he [ Jean-Dominique Ingres, French classicist painter] is a damned good man... The most modern of the moderns. Do you know why I take my hat off to him? Because he forced his fantastic draughtsmanship down the throats of the idiots who now claim to understand it. But here there are only two: Delacroix and Courbet. The rest are scoundrels.

Paul Cézanne

Ingres was one of those artists to whom the outline was something sacred and magical, and the reason is that it was the means of reconciling the major conflict in his art, the conflict between abstraction and sensibility. The difference between what we see and a sheet of white paper with a few thin lines on it is very great. Yet this abstraction is one which we seem to have adopted almost instinctively at an early stage in our development not only in Neolithic graffiti but in early Egyptian drawings. And in spite of its abstract character, the outline is responsive to the least tremor of sensibility.

Kenneth Clark

I put it [a still life of a pear, made by Manet there [on the wall, next to Ingres' painting 'Jupiter'], for a pear like that would overthrow any god. (Edgar Degas)

Ingres, a pupil of David, taught his students that draughtsmanship was of more importance than colour. " A thing well drawn," he said, " is always well enough painted."

Wynford Dewhurst