The Source (Ingres)

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The Source
La Source
Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres - The Spring - Google Art Project 2.jpg
Artist Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Alexandre Desgoffe, Paul Balze   OOjs UI icon edit-ltr-progressive.svg
Year1856
Mediumcanvas, oil paint
Dimensions163 cm (64 in) × 80 cm (31 in)
Location Musée d'Orsay, Paris, France OOjs UI icon edit-ltr-progressive.svg
CollectionDepartment of Paintings of the Louvre, Musée d'Orsay   OOjs UI icon edit-ltr-progressive.svg
Accession no.RF 219  OOjs UI icon edit-ltr-progressive.svg
Identifiers Joconde work ID: 000PE001514
Bildindex der Kunst und Architektur ID: 20364924
[ edit on Wikidata]

The Source (French : La Source, meaning "The Water Source or The Spring") is an oil painting on canvas by French neoclassical painter Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. The work was begun in Florence around 1820 and not completed until 1856, in Paris. [1] [2] When Ingres completed The Source, he was seventy-six years old, [3] already famous, [4] and president of the École des Beaux-Arts. [5] The pose of the nude may be compared with that of another by Ingres, the Venus Anadyomene (1848), [6] and is a reimagination of the Aphrodite of Cnidus or Venus Pudica. [5] Two of Ingres' students, painters Paul Balze and Alexandre Desgoffe, helped to create the background and water jar. [1]

Contents

Description

The painting depicts a nude woman standing upright between an opening in the rocks and holding in her hands a pitcher, from which water flows. She thus represents a water source or spring, for which source is the normal French word, and which, in classical literature, is sacred to the Muses and a source of poetic inspiration. [7] She stands between two flowers, with their "vulnerability to males who wish to pluck them", [7] and is framed by ivy, plant of Dionysus the god of disorder, regeneration, and ecstasy. [7] The water she pours out separates her from the viewer, as rivers mark boundaries of which the crossing is symbolically important. [7]

Theme

Art historians Frances Fowle and Richard Thomson suggest that there is a "symbolic unity of woman and nature" in The Source, where the flowering plants and water serve as a background which Ingres fills with woman's "secondary attributes". [8]

Reception

The first exhibition of The Source was in 1856, the year it was completed. [9] The painting was received enthusiastically. [4] Duchâtel acquired the painting in 1857 for a sum of 25,000 francs. The state assumed title to the painting in 1878 and it passed to the Musée du Louvre. In 1986 it was transferred to the Musée d'Orsay. [1] The painting has been frequently exhibited and widely published. [1] [10]

Haldane Macfall in A History of Painting: The French Genius describes The Source as Ingres' "superb nude by which he is chiefly known". [11] Kenneth Clark in his book Feminine Beauty observed how The Source has been described as "the most beautiful figure in French painting." [12] Walter Friedländer in David to Delacroix referred to The Source simply as the most famous of Ingres' paintings. [13]

The model for the painting was the young daughter of Ingres' concierge. [11] In his Confessions of a Young Man , Irish novelist George Moore wrote, with relation to the morality of artistic production, "What care I that the virtue of some sixteen-year-old maid was the price for Ingres' La Source? That the model died of drink and disease in the hospital is nothing when compared with the essential that I should have La Source, that exquisite dream of innocence." [14]

See also

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 "La Source". Musée d'Orsay . Retrieved 2 March 2012.
  2. ↑ Houghton Mifflin Company (2003). The Houghton Mifflin dictionary of biography. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. pp. 782–. ISBN   978-0-618-25210-7.
  3. ↑ Arnheim, Rudolf (2004). Art and visual perception: a psychology of the creative eye. University of California Press. p. 152. ISBN   978-0-520-24383-5.
  4. 1 2 Magi, Giovanna (1999). Grand Louvre and the Musee D'Orsay. Casa Editrice Bonechi. p. 91. ISBN   978-88-7009-780-1.
  5. 1 2 Baguley, David (2000). Napoleon III and his regime: an extravaganza. LSU Press. pp. 317–. ISBN   978-0-8071-2624-0.
  6. ↑ Geist, Sidney (1988). Interpreting Cézanne. Harvard University Press. p. 93. ISBN   978-0-674-45955-7.
  7. 1 2 3 4 Ferber, Michael (2007). A dictionary of literary symbols. Cambridge University Press. pp. 75ff, 80f, 104f, 170ff. ISBN   978-0-521-87042-9.
  8. ↑ Fowle, Francis; Thomson, Richard (2003). Soil and stone: impressionism, urbanism, environment. Ashgate Publishing. p. 23. ISBN   978-0-7546-3685-4.
  9. ↑ Stoddart, David Michael (1990). The scented ape: the biology and culture of human odour. Cambridge University Press. p. 131. ISBN   978-0-521-39561-8.
  10. ↑ Fried, Michael (1998). Manet's modernism, or, The face of painting in the 1860s. University of Chicago Press. p. 518. ISBN   978-0-226-26217-8.
  11. 1 2 Macfall, Haldane (August 2004). A History of Painting: The French Genius (vol. 6). Kessinger Publishing. p. 275. ISBN   978-1-4179-4511-5.
  12. ↑ Henry A. Strobel (1999). Reflections: personal essays. Henry Strobel Publisher. p. 62. ISBN   978-1-892210-01-2.
  13. ↑ Friedländer, Walter F. (1952). David to Delacroix . Harvard University Press. p.  87. ISBN   978-0-674-19401-4.{{cite book}}: ISBN / Date incompatibility (help)
  14. ↑ Barrett, Cyril (1982). "The Morality of Artistic Production". The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism . 41 (2). Wiley-Blackwell: 137–144. doi:10.2307/430264. JSTOR   430264.
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