Keywords

post-narrative painting, classical reinterpretation, modern classicism, nineteenth-century painting

Abstract

Susan L. Siegfried’s Ingres: Painting Reimagined is a magisterial consideration of one of the most intriguing and elusive artists of the nineteenth century, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. As the summation of a three-decade long engagement with Ingres studies, this ambitious tome sets out to account for the strange and yet beguiling nature of his paintings, c. 1800-1840. In this book, Siegfried argues that the reason Ingres has remained an enigma has much to do with his refusal to produce works that conformed to centuries-old conventions structuring narrative painting. Ingres’s imaginative project, then, was to conceive of innovative strategies for imaging classical tales in the modern era. The outcome was the development of an approach that testified to his cogent and potent artistic vision. In the end, this “post-narrative painting” (p. 3), as Siegfried terms it, was nothing short of revolutionary.

Original Publication Citation

Review of Ingres: Painting Reimagined by Susan L. Siegfried (New Haven: Yale UP, 2009). For H-France, online reviews for the Society of French Historical Studies, vol. 11, issue 28 (January 2011).