Jean-Auguste Dominique Ingres

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres was a French painter and the great champion of line and classical order in the nineteenth century. Born in 1780, he became the leading defender of the smooth, precise Neoclassical style against the fiery color of the Romantics. He is famous for his elegant portraits and for sensuous nudes and exotic bathing scenes drawn from his imagination of the East.

He was a masterful draftsman who prized clean, flowing outlines, sometimes distorting his figures for the sake of graceful line. Though he saw himself mainly as a history painter, his portraits and nudes are now his most admired works. Ingres's refined, polished style influenced generations, and his cool elegance still stands as a high point of French academic art.