Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres Characteristics

by Thyra Guenther-Lübbers

A tondo! This is the term for a round painting. Round paintings are typical of the Italian Renaissance. Raphael, a dandy model of Ingres, frequently used them for religious themes. A tondo in the age of classicism, on the other hand, is extremely unusual. Initially, Ingres painted the piece of work on a rectangular canvas. What exactly prompted him to cutting it out circular is non known. What is certain, however, is that the round format gives the work a different character. The viewer now perceives the scene as if through a keyhole. Involuntarily, 1 slips into the role of a voyeur. This adds even more tension to the already erotically charged picture.

The picture show shows about 25 young women in a harem hamam. They are lying unclothed on orange-red cushions around a water bowl on the left border of the movie. They are making music, dancing, drinking java, eating food or smoking their hair. The majority of the ladies, however, are relaxing in sometimes lascivious poses. Their postures likewise requite the work an air of languor and relaxation. Many of them wearable gold jewellery and headdresses typical of oriental culture. Wearing these accessories puts their nakedness into perspective for the viewer's center. However, the fantasy of this is fuelled by 2 incense objects. Past depicting the smoke, Ingres wants to awaken the viewer's sense of smell and bring him a little closer to the scene - even if merely in thought. However, there is no communication between the bathers and the viewer. This fact once over again places the viewer in the office of voyeur.

The ladies can be divided into two groups. I group plays the foreground, the other fills the groundwork. The figures in the foreground are depicted in a brighter light. Especially kissed by the lite and thus highlighted is the lady playing Tschégour, who turns her back to the viewer. Ingres dedicated a split piece of work to this back nude as early every bit 1808. The Bathers of Valpincon too hangs in the Musée du Louvre. More l years lie between the creation of the Bathers and that of the Turkish Bath. The oriental theme of the harem thus occupied Ingres throughout his artistic life. And this despite the fact that he had never been to the Orient. His depictions are based solely on written sources, such every bit letters and his imagination. The Turkish Bath can be seen as a bright determination to this ongoing preoccupation. Here the creative person shows once more that he is capable of depicting female bodies in every believable pose. To put it crudely, this means that he strings together one nude model from his studio after the next. The result is that the ladies, each in her own right, seem isolated and their gazes seem to devious into pettiness. Advice between them is express and only takes place through gestures and non through eye contact.

The harem, or rather the ladies of the harem, was to remain the nearly pop subject for the entire Orientalist movement, which was specially pop with French and British artists, precisely because so many legends were entwined around it and at that place were no limits to the imagination as to what breathtaking things went on there behind closed gates. Through Orientalism, the harem ladies replaced the female figures of Greek mythology equally the personnel of nude works. By personifying them every bit such a lady, the representation of the naked female trunk was transferred to another cultural sphere and the Western (male) viewer could bask it, morally unobjectionable.

Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres - The Turkish Bath

Oil on canvas, 1862, 108 x 110 cm, Musée du Louvre, Paris

Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres - The Turkish Bath

Oil on canvass, 1808, 98 x 146 cm, Musée du Louvre, Paris