Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres

Count de Rochambeau, Paris;
Dr. Arthur Kauffmann, London;
Emil Georg Bührle, Zürich, by 1953;
Private Collection, Zurich

Ingres, exhib. cat., Paris, Musée du Petit Palais, 1967, under no. 107;
G. Vigne, 'Sur un rocher au milieu des flots', Bulletin Musée Ingres, 1999, p. 11, no. 19 and p. 13, fig. 19, reproduced

Hinge mounted. The drawing was originally executed on tracing paper and has then been laid down on paper ( a technique commonly employed by the artist). There is some very slight creasing to the extremities of the sheet. The left edge is somewhat uneven and there is a very small nick to the lower left edge of the sheet. The medium itself is strong throughout this highly attractive sheet. Sold in a giltwood frame.
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This highly sensual drawing by Ingres was executed circa 1819 as a study for the figure of Angelica, the central focus of the artist's iconic painting of Roger freeing Angelica (fig.1), now in the collection of the Musée du Louvre, Paris.  A work of great beauty in its own right, the drawing is also the most important surviving study for one of the figures that defines our image of Ingres as an artist. 

Ingres received the commission for this painting in 1817 while living in Rome, finishing the work in 1819.  Shortly after its completion it was exhibited in Paris at the Salon of the same year, alongside his Grande Odalisque,¹ before being purchased by the Comte de Blacas, the French ambassador to the Vatican, on behalf of Louis XVIII.  It was installed above a doorway in the throne room of Versailles from 1820 until 1823 before being relocated to the Musée du Luxembourg, making history in the process by becoming Ingres' first painting to enter a public collection.  Now in the Musée du Louvre, the painting remains one of the most instantly recognisable images in the museum's entire collection.

The subject of Roger freeing Angelica originates, like many of the historical and mythological subjects Ingres portrayed, from an earlier literary source -- in this instance Ludovico Ariosto’s epic poem, Orlando Furioso, which was first published in its complete form in 1532.  The poem tells the tale of the conflict between Christian knights and Saracens at the time of Charlemagne, and was hugely popular as an artistic subject, with Jean-Honoré Fragonard executing an entire series of over 150 drawings based on the narrative.²  Angelica, who in the present work is portrayed perilously exposed with her hands chained, was the daughter of the King of Cathay and, in wonderfully Medieval fashion, the object of many knights’ desires.  In a narrative that shares obvious parallels with the classical myth of Perseus and Andromeda, Ariosto tells how, having been abducted by barbarians, Angelica is left naked and chained to a rock, as a human sacrifice to a sea orc.  Fortunately the knight Roger comes to Angelica’s rescue on a hippogriff, a legendary creature with the front quarters of an eagle and the hindquarters of a horse, dazzling the orc with his shield and freeing the defenceless damsel, before returning her to safety.  It would seem, however, that this particular narrative detail has been left open for reinterpretation by Ingres, who rather than having Roger bamboozling the orc with his shield, depicts him instead conducting a rather more convincing job with his lance, à la St. George and the Dragon.

Indeed, given the fact that Ingres went on to paint several later versions of the Louvre composition, it is the presence of the lance crossing Angelica’s legs in our drawing that incontrovertibly links it to the original painting of 1819, as none of the later painted versions include this detail in their compositions.  In contrast, in a reduced copy of the painting, executed by Ingres in a vertical format some time before 1839 and now in the National Gallery, London,³ Roger’s lance can clearly be seen impaling the orc, but not overlapping Angelica in any way, so the present drawing clearly does not correspond to this later composition.

As one would expect from Ingres, whose output of preparatory drawings, particularly for important commissions, tended to be prodigious, the present work fits into a substantial corpus of compositional and figure drawings relating not only to his original painting of 1819, but also to the National Gallery version and a further painting in Montauban.⁴  Yet although the Musée Ingres in Montauban possesses an exquisite preliminary drawing for the figure of Roger,⁵ they only have a significantly smaller and less finished study for Angelica, with her face only faintly indicated,⁶ and no other, more substantial drawing for this crucial figure is known elsewhere.

This is therefore the most significant known study for one of the key figures in Ingres' entire painted oeuvre.  It is the most comparable, both in composition and level of finish, to the final figure of Angelica seen in the original, first painting of 1819, and as such it is a fascinating and important art historical record, as well as a highly impressive and iconic image, and a very beautiful drawing in its own right.

^1. Musée du Louvre, Paris, inv. no. R.F. 1158

^2. See M.-A. Dupuy-Vachey, Fragonard et le Roland furieux, Paris 2003

^3. National Gallery, London, inv. no. NG3292

^4. See G. Vigne, Dessins d'Ingres, Catalogue raisonné des dessins du musée de Montauban, Paris 1995, p. 238, reproduced

^5. Ibid., p. 236, no. 1305, p. 237, fig. 1305, reproduced

^6. Ibid., p. 238, no. 1315, fig. 1315, reproduced