Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres

The artist's studio stamp (L.1477);
René Engel, Geneva

The Timeless Eye. Master Drawings from the Jan and Marie-Anne Krugier-Poniatowski Collection, exhib. cat., Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, Venice, 1999, p. 406, reproduced

Hinge mounted. The sheet has begun to lift in palces due to the way it is currently hinged to the mount. There are areas of surface dirt throughout and some minor creases to the lower half of the sheet. Sold in a modern giltwood frame.
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Commissioned by the Bishop of Autun in 1824, to replace Fra Bartolommeo’s Mystic Marriage of St. Catherine which had been requisitioned by the Louvre, Ingres finally unveiled his painting of the Martyrdom of St. Symphorien at the Salon of 1834 to a mixed critical reception, leading the artist to return to Italy to escape the unsympathetic professional atmosphere of Paris.

Ingres devoted a great deal of time to this commission, even visiting Autun, the scene of the Martyrdom which took place at the Port St. André, circa 165 A.D., where he was able to study the local architecture and to see the pendant painting by Jean-Louis-César Lair which was already hanging in the Cathedral.  He also made a very large number of preparatory studies, second in number only to those for L'Age d'Or, of which over two hundred are in the museum at Montauban and many others in public and private collections around the world. 

Although unrelated to any of the characters in the final painting the present work is very closely connected to the figure of an anguished woman found in one of Ingres highly finished oil studies (Fig. 1) made in preparation for the final work. Seemingly shielding her face from the oncoming horror, our figure can be seen positioned directly above the finished study of St. Symphorien, leaving no doubt that it was for this project that the present work was intended. Although Ingres eventually settled on a final composition that does not feature this particular figure, the present work perfectly captures the physical discomfort and horror of a female bystander in this most dramatic scene, prior to St. Symphorien’s martyrdom.