Portrait of monsieur Bertin - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Portrait of Monsieur Bertin is an 1832 oil-on-canvas portrait by the French painter Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres

Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres was a French Neoclassical painter. Although he considered himself to be a painter of history in the tradition of Nicolas Poussin and Jacques-Louis David, by the end of his life it was Ingres's portraits, both painted and drawn, that were recognized as his greatest...

, housed in the Musée du Louvre since 1897. It depicts Louis-François Bertin

Louis-François Bertin

Louis-François Bertin, also known as Bertin l'Aîné was a French journalist...

, a writer, art collector, press magnate

Media proprietor

A media proprietor is a person who controls, either through personal ownership or a dominant position in any media enterprise. Those with significant control of a public company in the mass media may also be called "media moguls", "tycoons", "barons", or "bosses".The figure of the media proprietor...

as director of the pro-royalist Journal des débats

Journal des Débats

The Journal des débats was a French newspaper, published between 1789 and 1944 that changed title several times...

, and friend and patron of the artist. Bertin was a well-known and respected member of the French upper-middle class, and in Ingres' portrait he becomes a symbol of the confident and commercially minded men who drove France through that era. For this reason the painting came to represent the liberal reign

July Monarchy

The July Monarchy , officially the Kingdom of France , was a period of liberal constitutional monarchy in France under King Louis-Philippe starting with the July Revolution of 1830 and ending with the Revolution of 1848...

of Louis Philippe I.

Bertin was some years older than Ingres. The two men became friends, with Bertin acting as a father figure to the painter. This work is one of the few commissioned portraits that Ingres agreed to paint during this period, but it is considered his most successful. At the time Ingres was enjoying his first success as an artist, but as a portraitist rather than history painter

History painting

History painting is a genre in painting defined by subject matter rather than an artistic style, depicting a moment in a narrative story, rather than a static subject such as a portrait...

. This was a major source of fustration to him, he believed history painting to be more important and noble than mere portraiture of contemporaries. The painting brought him international repute but little personal satisfaction. As with most of Ingres' portraits, the work had a prolonged, tortured genesis: it took the artist years to settle on a pose for Bertin that he found satisfactory.

The final composition draws influence from Flemish painting

Flemish painting

Flemish painting flourished from the early 15th century until the 17th century. Flanders delivered the leading painters in Northern Europe and attracted many promising young painters from neighbouring countries. These painters were invited to work at foreign courts and had a Europe-wide influence...

in its unflinching realism

Realism

Realism, Realist or Realistic are terms that describe any manifestation of philosophical realism, the belief that reality exists independently of observers, whether in philosophy itself or in the applied arts and sciences. In this broad sense it is frequently contrasted with Idealism.Realism in the...

and depiction of the effects of ageing. Bertin is shown as a restless force of nature, his bulk spilling out of the canvas. The portrait became an instant and enduring critical and popular success. It was highly praised when exhibited at the Salon in 1833, and has influenced both academic painters, such as Léon Bonnat

Léon Bonnat

Léon Joseph Florentin Bonnat was a French painter.He was born in Bayonne, but from 1846 to 1853 he lived in Madrid, where his father owned a bookshop. While tending his father's shop, he copied engravings of works by the Old Masters, developing a passion for drawing...

, and modernist artists like Edgar Degas

Edgar Degas

Edgar Degas[p] , born Hilaire-Germain-Edgar De Gas, was a French artist famous for his work in painting, sculpture, printmaking and drawing. He is regarded as one of the founders of Impressionism although he rejected the term, and preferred to be called a realist...

and Pablo Picasso

Pablo Picasso

Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso known as Pablo Ruiz Picasso was a Spanish expatriate painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and stage designer, one of the greatest and most influential artists of the...

. Today it is regarded as Ingres' finest male portrait, and one of his most important and influential paintings.

Background

From early in Ingres' career, the Romantic

Romanticism

Romanticism was an artistic, literary and intellectual movement that originated in the second half of the 18th century in Europe, and gained strength in reaction to the Industrial Revolution...

movement threatened the neoclassical approach to art, which had developed in part from the way France then saw herself as the cultural center of Europe, a successor to Rome. Painting became freer and more expressive, more concerned with colour than line or form, and more focused on artistic style than subject matter. Paintings based on major classical themes, painstakingly built up from highly described small details, fell out of fashion, replaced by regard for the holistic form of the work, and contemporary rather than historical settings. Ingres resisted this move away from academic art, and wrote, "The history painter shows the species in general; while the portrait painter represents only the specific individual—a model often ordinary and full of shortcomings."

As a struggling young artist, however, Ingres' income depended on commissioned

Commission (art)

In art, a commission is the hiring and payment for the creation of a piece, often on behalf of another.In classical music, ensembles often commission pieces from composers, where the ensemble secures the composer's payment from private or public organizations or donors.- Commissions for public art...

portraits, a genre he despised as lacking the grandeur of classical subject matter and which became a lifelong burden. He agreed to commissioned portraits, which brought him renown. With his early financial difficulties behind him, by the 1830s though by then acclaimed as a portraitist and much sought-after by patrons, he was accepting few commissions, preferring to work on historical subject matter. He wrote in 1847, "Damned portraits, they are so difficult to do that they prevent me getting on with greater things that I could do more quickly".

With the Bertin commission, Ingres was sufficiently moved by the subject's strong personality to accept the undertaking. Bertin, who was 66 in 1832, probably came into contact with Ingres via his son Édouard Bertin

Édouard Bertin

François Édouard Bertin was a French painter born in Paris, the son of the renowned journalist Louis-François Bertin. Édouard studied under Girodet-Trioson and Bidauld. He represented the details and general character of a landscape with great skill, but was less successful in his colouring...

, a student of the painter from 1827 or the art critic on the Journal, Ingres's friend Étienne-Jean Delécluze

Étienne-Jean Delécluze

Etienne-Jean Delécluze was a French painter and critic.From 1797 on, he was a pupil of Jacques-Louis David, as he describes in his biography of David...

. He was a leader of the French upper class and a supporter of Louis-Philippe. Backed by the Bourbon Restoration

Bourbon Restoration

The Bourbon Restoration is the name given to the period following the successive events of the French Revolution , the end of the First Republic , and then the forcible end of the First French Empire under Napoleon – when a coalition of European powers restored by arms the monarchy to the...

, Bertin directed the Moniteur until 1823, when the Journal des débats

Journal des Débats

The Journal des débats was a French newspaper, published between 1789 and 1944 that changed title several times...

became the recognised organ of the liberal

Liberalism

Liberalism is the belief in the importance of liberty and equal rights. Liberals espouse a wide array of views depending on their understanding of these principles, but generally, liberals support ideas such as constitutionalism, liberal democracy, free and fair elections, human rights,...

-constitution

Constitution

A constitution is a set of fundamental principles or established precedents according to which a state or other organization is governed. These rules together make up, i.e. constitute, what the entity is...

al opposition after he had come to criticize absolutism

Absolute monarchy

Absolute monarchy is a monarchical form of government in which the monarch exercises ultimate governing authority as head of state and head of government, his or her power not being limited by a constitution or by the law. An absolute monarch thus wields unrestricted political power over the...

. Bertin gave his support, however, to the July Monarchy

July Monarchy

after 1830.

Description

Bertin is shown in three-quarter profile against a gold–brown background lit from his right. He is seated in a chair, the arms of which reflect light from the upper left of the canvas. His fingers are spread on his knees and his hair is grey or nearly white. His massive bulk is stuffed into a tight black jacket, black trousers and brown satin waistcoat, with a white shirt and cravat

Cravat

The cravat is a neckband, the forerunner of the modern tailored necktie and bow tie, originating from 17th-century Croatia.From the end of the 16th century, the term band applied to any long-strip neckcloth that was not a ruff...

showing at his open neck. He wears a gold watch and has a pair of glasses in his right pocket. In the view of art critic Robert Rosenblum

Robert Rosenblum

Robert Rosenblum was an American art historian and curator known for his influential and often irreverent scholarship on European and American art of the mid-eighteenth to 20th century....

, his "nearly ferocious presence" is accentuated by the apparently constrained space he occupies. His chair and clothes appear almost too small to contain him. His coiled, stubby fingers rest on his thighs and barely protrude from the sleeves of his jacket, while his neck cannot be seen above his narrow starched white collar. The Greek meander pattern at the bottom of the wall seems unusually close to the picture plane

Picture plane

A picture plane is the imaginary flat surface which is usually located between the station point and the object being viewed and is ordinarily a vertical plane perpendicular to the horizontal projection of the line of sight to the object's order of interest....

, confining him further. The wall is painted in an abstract gold, which according to critic Robert Lubar adds to the sense of a monumental portrait of a modern icon.
Bertin leans slightly forward. His manner is imposing and he confronts the viewer with a hard, knowing and ironic stare. He appears about to speak, his facial expression seemingly etched with the certainty of the argument he is about to put forward. Perhaps influenced by Poussin

Nicolas Poussin

Nicolas Poussin was a French painter in the classical style. His work predominantly features clarity, logic, and order, and favors line over color. His work serves as an alternative to the dominant Baroque style of the 17th century...

's Self-Portrait with Allegory of Painting (1650), Ingres has minutely detailed the veins and wrinkles of Bertin's face.

The painting is highly symmetrical, and divides horizontally. The most obvious marker of symmetry is his mouth, which turns downwards at the left and upwards at the right. This break in expression is intended to show the duality of his personality: on the one hand a hard-nosed businessman, on the other a liberal patron of the arts. His heavily lidded eyes are circled by the oppositely curled rounded twists of his white collar, and the twists of his hair, eyebrows and eyelids.

Ingres later added the reflection of the window seen on the rim of Bertin's chair. It is a barely discernible detail, but in its reduced size attempts to supply more pictorial depth than such devices normally strive for. It has been identified as a direct reference to Raphael

Raphael

Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino , better known simply as Raphael, was an Italian painter and architect of the High Renaissance. His work is admired for its clarity of form and ease of composition and for its visual achievement of the Neoplatonic ideal of human grandeur...

's Portrait of Pope Leo X

Portrait of Leo X (Raphael)

The Portrait of Pope Leo X with two Cardinals is a painting by the Italian High Renaissance master Raphael, circa 1518-1519. It is housed in the Uffizi Gallery of Florence....

(c. 1519), in which a window is reflected in the gilded pommel of the pope's chair.

The painting is rendered almost exclusively in blacks, grays and browns, with the exceptions of the white collar and sleeves, a single patch of sharp red in the seat cushion, and the reddish light falling on the leather of the chair. In 19th-century art and fashion, colour was associated with femininity and emotion; male portraiture tended towards muted shades and monochromatic contrasts. Female portraits, and especially those by Ingres, tend to show the sitter in a relaxed pose, dressed in and surrounded by splendour. By convention, a female portrait was for men to gaze upon: "without moral mystery, it awaits, like a white page, until the sensibility of a man inscribes his dream upon it. It is a permanent spectacle, open, like a landscape to admiration." The sitter in Ingres' Baronne de Rothschild

Baronne de Rothschild

Baronne de Rothschild is a 1848 oil and canvas portrait by the French Neoclassical artist Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres. The sitter, Betty de Rothschild had married banker James Mayer de Rothschild and was one of the wealthiest women in northern Europe, and one of the foremost Parisian patrons of...

(1848) looks out at the viewer with almost the same directness as Bertin, but the image is softened by the attractiveness of the Baronne's dress and her relaxed pose. Bertin is upright and alert, the subdued colours bringing the viewer to full concentration on his face and character, the "epitome of modern masculinity."

Preparation and execution

Ingres was self-demanding in all his artistic endeavours, regardless of his opinion on their genre

Hierarchy of genres

A hierarchy of genres is any formalization which ranks different genres in an art form in terms of their prestige and cultural value....

's worth. Generally consumed with self-doubt, his portraits often took several years to complete, with large gaps of tortured inactivity between sittings. He put a great deal of thought and effort into finding a pose for Bertin that would best convey both the sitter's age and restless energy. Ingres became frustrated by his inability to do so, to the extent that on a number of occasions he broke down in tears in the studio. Bertin remembered, "I would spend my time in consoling him: 'my dear Ingres, don't bother about me; and above all don't torment yourself like that. You want to start my portrait over again? Take your own time for it. You will never tire me, and just as long as you want me to come, I am at your orders.'"
A preparatory study shows Bertin standing with his hand leaning on a table in an almost Napoleonic pose. This was likely an attempt to show how the ruling classes of France were now the members of the business class and bourgeoisie. Eventually the artist noticed a pose his friend, Eugène Emmanuel Amaury Duval, had taken on while seated outside a café. Although his account differs from Ingres', Amaury Duval remembered, "One day Ingres was dining here...chatting to a friend, I was, it appears in the pose of the portrait." According to Bertin, on their next encounter Ingres "came close and speaking almost in my ear said: 'Come sit tomorrow, your portrait is done.'" The final work was completed within a month.

In this new pose the political message becomes more subtle, as Ingres reverses the role of the two men as artist and sitter. Ingres becomes the cool, detached observer, while Bertin, usually a calm and reasoned—almost motherly—patron of the arts, is shown restless and impatient, a mirror of Ingres's irritation at spending time on portraiture when he could be exploring classical themes.

Reception and influence

Portrait of Monsieur Bertin was first exhibited at the 1833 Salon alongside his 1807 Portrait of Mme Devauçay. It met with universal praise, and became his most successful artwork to that point. It sealed his reputation as a portraitist; then as today it is considered his greatest male portrait. Ingres himself said "Since my portraits of Bertin and Molé, everybody wants portraits. There are six that I've turned down, or am avoiding, because I can't stand them".

One critic compared it to the work of the German Balthasar Denner

Balthasar Denner

Balthasar Denner was a German painter, highly-regarded as a portraitist. He painted mostly half-length and head-and-shoulders portraits and a few group portraits of families in interiors...

(1685–1749), a realist painter heavily influence by Jan van Eyck

Jan van Eyck

Jan van Eyck was a Flemish painter active in Bruges and considered one of the best Northern European painters of the 15th century....

, who in the words of Ingres scholar Robert Rosenblum "specialised in recording every last line on the faces of aged men and women, and even reflections of windows in their eyes." Another wrote "It is impossible to take truthfulness any further...This is a portrait that walks and talks."

The work's almost photographic realism

Photorealism

Photorealism is the genre of painting based on using the camera and photographs to gather information and then from this information creating a painting that appears photographic...

gained a lot of attention when it was first exhibited, both positive and negative. Some saw it as an affront to Romanticism, while others saw its debt to the Flemish attention to detail served not only to show an acute likeness, but in its small highly described details builds a psychological profile of the sitter. Art historian Geraldine Pelles sees Bertin as "at once intense, suspicious, and aggressive". She notes that there is a certain amount of projection

Psychological projection

Psychological projection or projection bias is a psychological defense mechanism where a person subconsciously denies his or her own attributes, thoughts, and emotions, which are then ascribed to the outside world, usually to other people...

of the artist's own personality at play, and recalls Théophile Silvestre's description of Ingres; "There he was squarely seated in an armchair, motionless as an Egyptian god carved of granite, his hands stretched wide over parallel knees, his torso stiff, his head haughty".

Due to a changing political climate and a move away from literal academic art

Academic art

Academic art is a style of painting and sculpture produced under the influence of European academies of art. Specifically, academic art is the art and artists influenced by the standards of the French Académie des Beaux-Arts, which practiced under the movements of Neoclassicism and Romanticism,...

, Ingres' portrait came to represent the old guard for the following generation of artists. Its overwhelming masculinity, conveyed through the full frontal pose, sobriety, and close attention to the details of the sitter's face, skin and hair are in marked contrast to the then conventional portrayal of women, exemplified by Ingres' portrait of Mademoiselle Caroline Rivière

Mademoiselle Caroline Rivière

The portrait of Mademoiselle Caroline Rivière was painted in 1806 by the French Neoclassical artist Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, and today hangs in the Louvre. It is the third of three portraits of the Rivière family the artist painted that year...

. Portraits of women tended to be dreamy, soft focus and corporeal.

Provenance

Bertin commissioned and acquired it in 1832, leaving it to his daughter Louise on his death. She left it to her niece Marie, who married Jules Bapst, also director of the Journal. Their niece Cécile Bapst was its last private owner. Cécile sold it to the Musée du Louvre in 1897, where it now hangs.

The painting is signed, in capital text, J.Ingres Pinxit 1832 at top left, with L.F. Bertin, also in capitals, inscribed at top right.

External links

Louis-François Bertin Musée du Louvre