Surgical strike on the Louvre: Ingres

This afternoon I hopped over to the Louvre to quickly see the Ingres exhibit. I enjoyed it a lot. It's amazing how a museum doesn't make me so tired when I'm only there for an hour.

There were the odalisques, but what really interested me were the portraits. In contrast to the sexy ladies and religious subjects, these portraits showed people with real personalities. I found myself standing in a room full of Ingres portraits (mostly of men, but with a couple of women) and feeling like each one of them had a life behind those eyes. You could tell who was confident, who was conniving, who was charming, who was needy, who was open.

Of course, this comment doesn't hold for the room of society ladies' portraits; their expressions were positively blank. Or maybe they were just all exquisitely boring women in real life.

Also very moving was a set of pencil drawings he did of his wife, who he apparently loved very much, and she indeed seemed like quite a woman, just judging from the look in her eyes. He did one drawing of her with himself standing behind her in the background, and called it something like "Madame Ingres and her spouse."

Ingres played violin as a hobby, and in fact there is a phrase in French "violon d'Ingres" to denote a hobby. And they actually had the violin of Ingres there on display, which was cute. And there were a number of drawings of composers: Lizst, Paganini, Cherubini... and of the latter, an oil painting depicting him old and tired in front of a fresco in which an angel, cracked with age, seems to be reaching out to protect him. There you can really see the difference between the angel's blank expression and Cherubini's human one.