Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres

Edgar Degas, Paris (Sale: Atelier Degas, Galerie Georges Petit, Paris, 26th -27th  March 1918, lot 188)
Bernheim-Jeune, Paris
Sacha Guitry, Paris
Mrs Drey, New York (Sold: 10th December 1985)
Acquired from the above by the late owner

Tübingen, Kunsthalle Tübingen & Brussels, Palais des Beaux-Arts, Ingres und Delacroix: Aquarelle und Zeichnungen, 1986, illustrated in colour in the catalogue

New York, Jan Krugier Gallery, The Presence of Ingres, Important works by Ingres, Degas, Picasso, Matisse and Balthus, 1988, no. 21

New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art, The Private Collection of Edgar Degas, 1997-1998, fig. 193

Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin & Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Linie, Licht und Schatten. Meisterzeichnungen und Skulpturen der Sammlung Jan und Marie-Anne Krugier-Poniatowski, 1999, no. 65, illustrated in colour in the catalogue

Madrid, Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Miradas sin Tiempo. Dibujos, Pinturas y Esculturas de la Coleccion Jan y Marie-Anne Krugier-Poniatowski, 2000, no. 91, illustrated in colour in the catalogue

The Private Collection of Edgar Degas. A Summary catalogue (exhibition catalogue), The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1997, no. 642, illustrated p. 73

Laid down. Overall in good condition. Drawn on a type of tracing paper. There is some light foxing. Two stains at the top corners from previous attachment to mount. Another small stain in the middle of the top margin. Other very small scattered stains. Some blue-ish dots on the sheet, possibly studio stains. Sold in a modern, wooden and gilded frame.
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This rapidly drawn study of a hand, dashed off in red chalk with immense authority, betrays very strikingly Ingres’ technical and aesthetic grounding in the works of the Old Masters.  In both handling and conception, the study could at first sight almost be mistaken for a 16^th-century Italian drawing, though closer examination reveals the distinctive combination of linearity and tone so characteristic of Ingres’ freer studies executed in red or black chalk. 

This is, though, no ordinary hand.  The drawing is a working study for the monumental right hand of Jupiter, an important focal point in Ingres’ immense painting of Jupiter and Thetis, now in the Musée Granet, Aix-en-Provence (fig. 1), which the artist first conceived at the end of 1806, immediately following his arrival in Rome, but finally dispatched back to France only in 1811.  On its arrival in Paris, Ingres’ painting, with its extraordinary, stylised lighting, sensual yet unnatural anatomy and dramatic composition, caused a huge stir, and seriously unnerved the artist’s former teacher, Jacques-Louis David, who on seeing the picture observed: “I no longer know how to paint.” (Quoted in a letter of 22 December 1811 from another of David’s pupils, Théodore Suau, to his father in Toulouse; P. Mesplé, ‘David et ses élèves toulousains,’ Archives d’Art Français, vol. XXIV, 1969, p. 99.)

Although the dramatic frontality of the Jupiter and Thetis is in some ways a natural progression from Ingres’ ground-breaking 1806 depiction of Napoléon on the Imperial Throne (Paris, Musée de l’Armée), the dramatic contrast with the attenuated, smooth-skinned figure of Thetis was something entirely new, and the five-year delay in completing the picture clearly indicates how hard Ingres worked in arriving at his final solution.  This creative process is well documented through a series of notes and some fifteen studies in the Musée Ingres, Montauban, but of those other drawings, only a wonderful sheet of studies for Jupiter’s eagle comes close to the Krugier-Poniatowski study of a hand in terms of breadth and power of execution. (G. Vigne, Dessins d'Ingres. Catalogue raisonné des dessins du Musée de Montauban, Paris, 1995, pp. 20-23, nos. 20-36.)

The timeless brilliance of this study was not lost on Ingres' much younger compatriot, Edgar Degas (1834-1917), himself a brilliant draughtsman who was, like Ingres, one of those very rare 19th-century painters to combine a superb, genuinely classical mastery of line and form with a total modernity of vision.  The drawing was in Degas' own collection, from which it was only sold after the artist's death.