Joaquín Sorolla Bastida (Valencia, 27 de febrero de 1863 - Cercedilla, 10 de agosto de 1923) fue un pintor español. Artista prolífico, dejó más de 2200 obras catalogadas. Su obra madura ha sido etiquetada como impresionista, postimpresionista y luminista.

Cuando apenas contaba dos años de edad, fallecieron sus padres, víctimas de una epidemia de cólera. Al quedar huérfanos fueron acogidos, su hermana Concha y él, por su tía Isabel, hermana de su madre, y su marido, de profesión cerrajero. Pasados los años, su tío intentó enseñarle, en vano, el oficio de la cerrajería advirtiendo pronto que su verdadera vocación era la pintura.

Estudió dibujo en la Escuela de Artesanos de Valencia. Al acabar su formación comenzó a enviar sus obras a concursos provinciales y exposiciones nacionales de bellas artes, como la de Madrid en mayo de 1881, donde presentó tres marinas valencianas que pasaron inadvertidas, pues no encajaban con la pintura oficial, de temática histórica y dramática.

Al año siguiente estudió la obra de Velázquez y otros autores en el Museo del Prado. Tras visitar el Museo del Prado, Sorolla pintó en 1883 el lienzo inédito Estudio de Cristo, descubierto en 2012, donde se observa la influencia del Cristo crucificado de Velázquez. Comienza así su "etapa realista", siendo su profesor Gonzalo Salvá. 

Con su amigo, el también pintor Pedro Gil, se desplazó a París durante el primer semestre de 1885, y conoció de cerca la pintura impresionista, que produjo en él, ya de regreso en Roma, variaciones en su temática y estilo, llegando a pintar el cuadro religioso El entierro de Cristo, con el que no tuvo el éxito esperado. Tomó así contacto con las vanguardias europeas, destacando el impacto que le produjeron las obras de los pintores John Singer Sargent, Giovanni Boldini y Anders Zorn.

En 1888, contrajo matrimonio con Clotilde García del Castillo en Valencia, aunque vivirían un año más en Italia, esta vez en la localidad de Asís. 

En 1889, el pintor y su familia se instalaron en Madrid y, en apenas cinco años, Sorolla alcanzaría gran renombre como pintor. En 1894, viajó de nuevo a París, donde desarrolló un estilo pictórico denominado «luminismo», que sería característico de su obra a partir de entonces. Comenzó a pintar al aire libre, dominando con maestría la luz y combinándola con escenas cotidianas y paisajísticas de la vida mediterránea. 

​Tras muchos viajes por Europa, principalmente Inglaterra y Francia, celebró una exposición en París con más de medio millar de obras, lo que le dio un reconocimiento internacional inusitado, conociéndose su obra pictórica por toda Europa y América.

Hacia el verano de 1905 está en Jávea y realiza una serie de pinturas de niños desnudos, una de sus series más famosas y que le valieron el posterior encargo de la Hispanic Society of America. Uno de los cuadros más destacados de la serie es El baño, de 1905 y que pertenece a la colección del Museo Metropolitano de Nueva York.

Otra importante faceta que desarrolló en aquellos años fue la de retratista. Posaron para él personajes como Cajal, Galdós, Machado, su paisano Vicente Blasco Ibáñez, o políticos como Emilio Castelar, el rey Alfonso XIII, el presidente William Howard Taft, además de una buena colección de retratos de su familia y algunos autorretratos.

En 1914 había sido nombrado académico y, cuando terminó los trabajos para la Hispanic Society, trabajó como profesor de composición y color en la Escuela de Bellas Artes de Madrid.

​En 1920, mientras pintaba en el jardín de su casa el retrato de la mujer de Ramón Pérez de Ayala, sufrió una hemiplejia que mermó sus facultades físicas, impidiéndole seguir pintando. Murió tres años después en su residencia veraniega de Cercedilla el 10 de agosto de 1923.

En 1932, su casa de Madrid fue reabierta como Museo Sorolla. Su principal discípulo fue Teodoro Andreu.

Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida (27 February 1863 – 10 August 1923) was a Spanish painter. Sorolla excelled in the painting of portraits, landscapes and monumental works of social and historical themes. His most typical works are characterized by a dexterous representation of the people and landscape under the bright sunlight of Spain and sunlit water.

His first striking success was achieved with Another Marguerite (1892), which was awarded a gold medal at the National Exhibition in Madrid, then first prize at the Chicago International Exhibition, he soon rose to general fame and became the acknowledged head of the modern Spanish school of painting. His picture The Return from Fishing (1894) was much admired at the Paris Salon and was acquired by the state for the Musée du Luxembourg. It indicated the direction of his mature output.

Sorolla painted two masterpieces in 1897 linking art and science: Portrait of Dr. Simarro at the microscope and A Research. These paintings were presented at the National Exhibition of Fine Arts held in Madrid in that year and Sorolla won the Prize of Honor. Here, he presents his friend Simarro as a man of science who transmits his wisdom investigating and, in addition, it is the triumph of naturalism, as it recreates the indoor environment of the laboratory, catching the luminous atmosphere produced by the artificial reddish-yellow light of a gas burner that contrasts with the weak mauvish afternoon light that shines through the window. These paintings may be among the most outstanding world paintings of this genre

An even greater turning point in Sorolla's career was marked by the painting and exhibition of Sad Inheritance (1899), an extremely large canvas, highly finished for public consideration. The painting earned Sorolla his greatest official recognition, the Grand Prix and a medal of honor at the Universal Exhibition in Paris in 1900, and the medal of honor at the National Exhibition in Madrid in 1901. After this painting Sorolla never returned to a theme of such overt social consciousness.

within the next few years Sorolla was honoured as a member of the Fine Art Academies of Paris, Lisbon, and Valencia, and as a Favourite Son of Valencia.

Although formal portraiture was not Sorolla's genre of preference, because it tended to restrict his creative appetites and could reflect his lack of interest in his subjects, the acceptance of portrait commissions proved profitable, Sometimes the influence of Velázquez was uppermost, as in My Family (1901), a reference to Las Meninas which grouped his wife and children in the foreground, the painter reflected, at work, in a distant mirror. At other times the desire to compete with his friend John Singer Sargent was evident, as in Portrait of Mrs. Ira Nelson Morris and her children (1911).

But it was outdoors where he found his ideal portrait settings,  thus, not only did his daughter pose standing in a sun-dappled landscape for María at La Granja (1907), but so did Spanish royalty, for the Portrait of King Alfonso XIII in a Hussar's Uniform (1907). For Portrait of Mr. Louis Comfort Tiffany (1911), the American artist posed seated at his easel in his Long Island garden, surrounded by extravagant flowers. The conceit reaches its high point in My Wife and Daughters in the Garden (1910), in which the idea of traditional portraiture gives way to the sheer fluid delight of a painting constructed with thick passages of color, Sorolla's love of family and sunlight merged.

In 1911, Sorolla signed a contract with Archie Huntington to paint a series of oils on life in Spain. Huntington had envisioned the work depicting a history of Spain, but the painter preferred the less specific Vision of Spain, eventually opting for a representation of the regions of the Iberian Peninsula, and calling it The Provinces of Spain. Despite the immensity of the canvases, Sorolla painted all but one en plein air, and travelled to the specific locales to paint them: Navarre, Aragon, Catalonia, Valencia, Elche, Seville, Andalusia, Extremadura, Galicia, Guipuzcoa, Castile, Leon, and Ayamonte, at each site painting models posed in local costume. Each mural celebrated the landscape and culture of its region, panoramas composed of throngs of laborers and locals.

These 14 magnificent murals, installed to this day in the Hispanic Society of America building in Manhattan, range from 12 to 14 feet in height, and total 227 feet in length.The major commission of his career, it would dominate the later years of Sorolla's life.

By 1917 he was, by his own admission, exhausted. He completed the final panel by July 1919.

Sorolla suffered a stroke in 1920, while painting a portrait in his garden in Madrid. Paralysed for over three years, he died on 10 August 1923. He is buried in the Cementeri de Valencia, Spain.

After his death, Sorolla's widow, Clotilde García del Castillo, left many of his paintings to the Spanish public. The paintings eventually formed the collection that is now known as the Museo Sorolla, which was the artist's house in Madrid. The museum opened in 1932.

Sorolla's work is represented in museums throughout Spain, Europe, America, and in many private collections in Europe and America. In 1933, J. Paul Getty purchased ten Impressionist beach scenes made by Sorolla, several of which are now housed in the J. Paul Getty Museum.

In 1960, Sorolla, el pintor de la luz, a short documentary written and directed by Manuel Domínguez was presented at the Cannes Film Festival.

The Spanish National Dance Company honored the painter's The Provinces of Spain by producing a ballet Sorolla based on the paintings.

In the very successful Spanish TV series Gran Hotel produced by Bamboo Production, Helena Sanchís, the costume designer Joaquin Sorolla's artworks as her main inspiration and reference point for the design of the protagonists in the  period drama.

Books

Websites

• Museo Sorolla, Madrid

Videos

Jean Patou (27 septembre 1887 à Paris - 8 mars 1936 à Paris) est un couturier et fabricant de parfums français, créateur de la maison de couture et de parfums qui porte son nom.

Jean Alexandre Patou est né le 27 septembre 1887 à Paris (10e arrondissement) Jean Patou travaillera un temps aux côtés de son père avant de se tourner vers l'un de ses oncles exerçant la profession de fourreur auprès duquel il apprendra le métier. Cette expérience lui révèle alors son intérêt pour la mode. En octobre 1905, Jean Patou s'engage dans l'armée pour trois ans.

En 1910, il s'installe à Paris et décide d'ouvrir une maison de haute couture, au sein de laquelle il intègre un atelier de fourrures. En proie à des difficultés financières, cette première initiative se solde par un échec, mais Jean Patou réitère l'expérience en ouvrant en 1912 la « Maison Parry », un petit salon de couture situé au 4 rond-point des Champs-Élysées. Les débuts sont marqués par quelques balbutiements puisque Jean Patou ne suit pas totalement la mode contemporaine mais initie de nouvelles tendances tant par méconnaissance de « ce qui se fait » que par une vision avant-gardiste, la réception des modèles est alors aléatoire. Il en sera ainsi de sa première collection proposant de nombreuses vestes dans une époque où le goût privilégie les manteaux. Il n'empêche, bien que cette maison n'ait pas la prétention de s'élever au même niveau que les grands couturiers, Jean Patou parvient à séduire quelques actrices et demi-mondaines en proposant des modèles plus simples et moins onéreux que ses concurrents. En 1913, un acheteur américain connu comme « l'aîné Liechtenstein », venu pour acquérir quelques modèles, repart finalement avec l'entièreté de la collection, prouvant l'intérêt grandissant que suscitent les créations de Jean Patou. Réciproquement, cet achat consolide la Maison Parry et le maison et de l'installer dans un nouveau lieu, ainsi en 1914, il la transfère au 7 rue Saint-Florentin à proximité de la place de la Concorde dans un élégant hôtel particulier du xviiie siècle (il s'étendra par la suite au 9 et au 115). C'est à cette date que la maison prend le nom de Jean Patou & Cie et abrite tant l'atelier, les bureaux que les salons. À l'heure de la présentation de sa première collection, Patou est appelé au front, celle-ci ne verra alors jamais le jour. Après avoir participé à la Première Guerre mondiale comme capitaine dans un régiment de zouaves de l'armée d'Orient, basé aux Dardanelles, Jean Patou rentre à Paris en 1919 et relance véritablement l'activité de sa maison restée officieusement ouverte durant les dernières années.

Du fait de la guerre, Patou développe une nouvelle vision des relations humaines qu'il va alors appliquer dans la gestion de sa maison. Depuis ses débuts, il s'était entouré de sa sœur Madeleine et de l'époux de celle-ci Raymond Barbas, auxquels s'ajoutent maintenant Georges Bernard responsable de la couture mais aussi Elsa Maxwell, figure de la « café society » dont le rôle sera de promouvoir l'image de la maison. Maurice Le Bolzer, son ordonnance pendant la guerre, devient par ailleurs son chef du personnel. Patou cherche à s'entourer, à collaborer pour se consacrer pleinement à son poste de directeur artistique tout en se nourrissant du travail en équipe. Il s'inquiète également du bien-être de ses employés et instaure de nouvelles conditions de travail : ainsi, ils bénéficient d'une mutuelle et à partir de 1920 de congés payés, enfin un système de délégués voit le jour au sein de la maison. 
Il organise des défiles de mode grandioses, avec spectacle musical. De 21 h à minuit défilent ainsi entre 200 et 300 modèles, devant un ​parterre d'actrices, de personnalités politiques ou du monde des affaires, assis autour de petites tables où on leur apporte du champagne, du foie gras et des cigarettes. Pour les acheteurs étrangers, en particulier américain, sont mis en place une présentation à part des créations de Patou, ces derniers acquérant les patrons contre rémunération, et les produiront dans leur pays en ajoutant le nom du couturier. En 1924, il part pour les États-Unis chercher des silhouettes plus conformes aux attentes des clientes américaines, plus sveltes.

​Jean Patou ouvre aussi des boutiques dans les villes françaises mondaines de l'époque, Deauville, Biarritz, Cannes ou encore Monte-Carlo. La crise économique de 1929 met un terme à l'expansion de la maison de couture, endettée, et Jean Patou doit fermer ses succursales de province. 

Dans la continuité de ses premiers modèles, Jean Patou entretient dans les années 1920 une ligne fluide et tubulaire empreinte de simplicité pour le jour tandis que les tenues du soir tout en offrant des matières soyeuses s'enrichissent de broderies, de drapés et bouillonnés pour jouer avec la lumière des dancings. Il n'empêche, en accord avec le désir de liberté des femmes et plus précisément de liberté de mouvement, ces tenues se voient raccourcies dévoilant davantage les jambes. Pour ces créations, Jean Patou puise dans le répertoire stylistique contemporain usant de réminiscences historiques : par la coupe, fluide pouvant évoquer les tenues antiques ou leur réinterprétation du début du xixe siècle, par les matières, vaporeuses et légères avec l'emploi de la mousseline évoquant ces mêmes périodes ou plus travaillées formant nœuds et coques pour suggérer les modes plus romantiques du xixe siècle, elles-mêmes se nourrissant des modes médiévales. Cette dernière inspiration s'illustre également par l'emprunt au vestiaire religieux à l'instar de la robe portée par Nicoleta Arrivabene lors de son mariage avec le comte Edoardo Visconti di Modrone le 28 novembre 1929 à Venise.

En 1923, avec son beau-frère Raymond Barbas Jean Patou crée la division parfums de sa société de couture. En 1925 ils sont rejoints par le parfumeur grassois Henri Alméras, en tant que maître parfumeur.
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Jean Patou souhaitait un parfum phare pour sa maison. En 1930, Henri Alméras proposa alors une fragrance composée d'essences de rose et de jasmin dans des proportions particulièrement importantes: il fallait plus de 10 000 fleurs de jasmin de Grasse et 28 douzaines de roses (roses de mai de Grasse « Rosa centifolia » et roses de Bulgarie) pour obtenir trois centilitres de parfum. Le prix de cette composition rendait sa commercialisation très risquée alors que sévissait la crise économique qui suivit le krach de 1929. Mais Jean Patou fut séduit et lança la commercialisation sous la marque Joy et en utilisant le slogan particulièrement audacieux que lui avait suggéré son amie et conseillère, la chroniqueuse américaine Elsa Maxwell : Joy, le parfum le plus cher au monde (Joy, the most expensive perfume in the world)

Après sa mort, la maison de couture accueille plusieurs designers21 qui y font leurs débuts, comme Marc Bohan, Karl Lagerfeld, Jean Paul Gaultier ou même Christian Lacroix. Après le départ de ce dernier (appelé par le groupe LVMH pour créer la maison portant son nom), la maison de haute couture cesse ses activités pendant plus de trente ans, à partir de 1987. Pendant ce temps, l'activité parfums continue à se développer, d'abord au sein de la division « Prestige Beauté » du groupe Procter & Gamble de 2001 à juillet 2011 puis du groupe anglais Designer Parfums. En 2018, Jean Patou est racheté par le groupe LVMH, qui nomme Guillaume Henry (précédemment chez Carven puis Nina Ricci) à sa direction créative. La maison, rebaptisée Patou, présente sa première collection en septembre 2019.

Jean Patou (27 September 1887 – 8 March 1936) was a French fashion designer and founder of the Jean Patou brand.

Patou was born in Paris, France in 1887. Patou's family's business was tanning and furs.Patou worked with his uncle in Normandy, then moved to Paris in 1910, intent on becoming a couturier.

In 1912, he opened a small dressmaking salon called "Maison Parry". His entire 1914 collection was purchased by a single American buyer.Patou's work was interrupted by World War I and he served as a captain in the Zouaves.

Reopening his couture house in 1919, Jean Patou eradicated the flapper look by lengthening the skirt and designing sportswear for women and is considered the inventor of the knitted swimwear and the tennis skirt.

He, notably, designed the then-daring sleeveless and knee-length cut tennis wear for French tennis player Suzanne Lenglen. He also was the first designer to popularize the cardigan and moved fashion towards the natural and comfortable.

Jean Patou is credited with inventing the "designer tie" in the 1920s when men's ties, made in the same fabric as the women's dress collection, were displayed in department stores next to Patou's perfume counter.

Designers for the House of Patou have included Marc Bohan (1954–1956), Karl Lagerfeld (1960–1963) and Jean Paul Gaultier (1971–1973). Christian Lacroix joined the label in 1981. The last fashion collection produced by the House of Patou label was in 1987 when the haute couture business closed following Lacroix's departure to open his own house.

​After the closure of the haute couture business the company has continued to produce fragrances under the Jean Patou brand. Patou also produced fragrances for Lacoste, when Patou acquired the license in the 1960s, and Yohji Yamamoto in the 1990s

name:                Jules Lefebvre
birth place:        Tournan-en-Brie France
birth date:         14 March 1836
zodiac sign:       pisces
death place:       Paris France
death date:         24 February 1911

Jules Joseph Lefebvre (14 March 1836 – 24 February 1911) was a French figure painter, educator and theorist.

He was born in Tournan-en-Brie, Seine-et-Marne, on 14 March 1836.[1] He entered the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in 1852 and was a pupil of Léon Cogniet.

He won the prestigious Prix de Rome in 1861. Between 1855 and 1898, he exhibited 72 portraits in the Paris Salon. In 1891, he became a member of the French Académie des Beaux-Arts.

He was professor at the Académie Julian in Paris. Lefebvre is chiefly important as an excellent and sympathetic teacher who numbered many Americans among his 1500 or more pupils. Among his famous students were Fernand Khnopff, Kenyon Cox, Félix Vallotton, Ernst Friedrich von Liphart,Georges Rochegrosse,  the Scottish-born landscape painter William Hart, Walter Lofthouse Dean, and Edmund C. Tarbell, who became an American Impressionist painter. Another pupil was the miniaturist Alice Beckington. Jules Benoit-Lévy entered his workshop at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts.

Many of his paintings are single figures of beautiful women. Among his best portraits were those of M. L. Reynaud and the Prince Imperial (1874).

Lefebvre died in Paris on 24 February 1911.

Jules Lefebvre, né à Tournan-en-Brie le 14 mars 1834 et mort à Paris le 24 février 1912, est un peintre français.

Il est professeur à l'École des beaux-arts de Paris et à l'Académie Julian.

Venant de Seine-et-Marne, la famille de Jules Lefebvre s'établit à Amiens vers 1836. Son père y exerce la profession de boulanger. L'enfant fréquente l'école communale de dessin où son professeur, Joseph Fusillier, remarque son talent.

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres ( 29 August 1780 – 14 January 1867) was a French Neoclassical painter. Ingres was profoundly influenced by past artistic traditions and aspired to become the guardian of academic orthodoxy against the ascendant Romantic style. Although he considered himself a painter of history in the tradition of Nicolas Poussin and Jacques-Louis David, it is his portraits, both painted and drawn, that are recognized as his greatest legacy. His expressive distortions of form and space made him an important precursor of modern art, influencing Picasso, Matisse and other modernists.

Born into a modest family in Montauban, he travelled to Paris to study in the studio of David. In 1802 he made his Salon debut, and won the Prix de Rome for his painting The Ambassadors of Agamemnon in the tent of Achilles. By the time he departed in 1806 for his residency in Rome, his style—revealing his close study of Italian and Flemish Renaissance masters—was fully developed, and would change little for the rest of his life. While working in Rome and subsequently Florence from 1806 to 1824, he regularly sent paintings to the Paris Salon, where they were faulted by critics who found his style bizarre and archaic. He received few commissions during this period for the history paintings he aspired to paint, but was able to support himself and his wife as a portrait painter and draughtsman.

He was finally recognized at the Salon in 1824, when his Raphaelesque painting of the Vow of Louis XIII was met with acclaim, and Ingres was acknowledged as the leader of the Neoclassical school in France. Although the income from commissions for history paintings allowed him to paint fewer portraits, his Portrait of Monsieur Bertin marked his next popular success in 1833. The following year, his indignation at the harsh criticism of his ambitious composition The Martyrdom of Saint Symphorian caused him to return to Italy, where he assumed directorship of the French Academy in Rome in 1835 but he returned to Paris for good in 1841.

In his later years he painted new versions of many of his earlier compositions, a series of designs for stained glass windows, several important portraits of women, and The Turkish Bath, the last of his several Orientalist paintings of the female nude, which he finished at the age of 83.

Ingres was also an amateur violin player from his youth, and played for a time as second violinist for the orchestra of Toulouse. When he was Director of the French Academy in Rome, he played frequently with the music students and guest artists. Charles Gounod, who was a student under Ingres at the Academy, merely noted that "he was not a professional, even less a virtuoso". Along with the student musicians, he performed Beethoven string quartets with Niccolò Paganini. In an 1839 letter, Franz Liszt described his playing as "charming", and planned to play through all the Mozart and Beethoven violin sonatas with Ingres. Liszt also dedicated his transcriptions of the 5th and 6th symphonies of Beethoven to Ingres on their original publication in 1840.

Ingres was born in Montauban, Tarn-et-Garonne, France, his father Joseph Ingres was a successful jack-of-all-trades in the arts, a painter of miniatures, sculptor, decorative stonemason, and amateur musician; his mother was the nearly illiterate daughter of a master wigmaker. From his father the young Ingres received early encouragement and instruction in drawing and music, and his first known drawing, a study after an antique cast, was made in 1789. Starting in 1786 he attended the local school École des Frères de l'Éducation Chrétienne, but his education was disrupted by the turmoil of the French Revolution, and the closing of the school in 1791 marked the end of his conventional education. The deficiency in his schooling would always remain for him a source of insecurity.

In 1791, his father took him to Toulouse, where the young Jean-Auguste-Dominique was enrolled in the Académie Royale de Peinture, Sculpture et Architecture. There he studied under the sculptor Jean-Pierre Vigan, the landscape painter Jean Briant, and the neoclassical painter Guillaume-Joseph Roques. Roques' veneration of Raphael was a decisive influence on the young artist. Ingres won prizes in several disciplines, such as composition, "figure and antique", and life studies. His musical talent was developed under the tutelage of the violinist Lejeune, and from the ages of thirteen to sixteen he played second violin in the Orchestre du Capitole de Toulouse.

Ingres's well-known passion for playing the violin gave rise to a common expression in the French language, "violon d'Ingres", meaning a second skill beyond the one by which a person is mainly known. The American avant-garde artist Man Ray used this expression as the title of a famous photograph portraying Alice Prin (aka Kiki de Montparnasse) in the pose of the Valpinçon Bather.

From an early age he was determined to be a history painter, which, in the hierarchy of artists established by the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture under Louis XIV, and continued well into the 19th Century, was considered the highest level of painting. He did not want to simply make portraits or illustrations of real life like his father; he wanted to represent the heroes of religion, history and mythology, to idealize them and show them in ways that explained their actions, rivaling the best works of literature and philosophy.

In March 1797, the Academy awarded Ingres first prize in drawing, and in August he traveled to Paris to study in the studio of Jacques-Louis David, France's—and Europe's—leading painter during the revolutionary period, in whose studio he remained for four years. Ingres followed his master's neoclassical example. In 1797 David was working on his enormous masterpiece, The Intervention of the Sabine Women, and was gradually modifying his style away from Roman models of rigorous realism to the ideals of purity, virtue and simplicity in Greek art. One of the other students of David, Étienne-Jean Delécluze, who later became an art critic, described Ingres as a student:

          He was distinguished not just by the candor of his character and his disposition to work alone ... he was one of the most studious ... he took little part in all the turbulent follies around him, and he studied with more perseverance than most of his co-disciples ... All of the qualities which characterize today the talent of this artist, the finesse of contour, the true and profound sentiment of the form, and a modeling with extraordinary correctness and firmness, could already be seen in his early studies. While several of his comrades and David himself signaled a tendency toward exaggeration in his studies, everyone was struck by his grand compositions and recognized his talent.

He was admitted to the painting department of the École des Beaux-Arts in October 1799. In 1800 and 1801, he won the grand prize for figure painting for his paintings of male torsos and competed for the Prix de Rome, the highest prize of the Academy, which entitled the winner to four years of residence at the Académie de France in Rome. He came in second in his first attempt, but in 1801 he took the top prize with The Ambassadors of Agamemnon in the tent of Achilles. The figures of the envoys, in the right of the painting, are muscular and solid as statues, in the style taught by David, but the two main figures on the left, Achilles and Patroclus, are mobile, vivid and graceful, like figures in a delicate bas-relief.

His residence in Rome was postponed until 1806 due to shortage of state funds. In the meantime he worked in Paris alongside several other students of David in a studio provided by the state, and further developed a style that emphasized purity of contour. He found inspiration in the works of Raphael, in Etruscan vase paintings, and in the outline engravings of the English artist John Flaxman. His drawings of Hermaphrodite and the Nymph Salmacis showed a new stylized ideal of female beauty, which would reappear later in his Jupiter et Thetis and his famous nudes.

In 1802 he made his debut at the Salon with Portrait of a Woman (the current whereabouts of which is unknown). Between 1804 and 1806 he painted a series of portraits which were striking for their extreme precision, particularly in the richness of their fabrics and tiny details. These included the Portrait of Philipbert Riviére (1805), Portrait of Sabine Rivière (1805–06), Portrait of Madame Aymon (also known as La Belle Zélie; 1806), and Portrait of Caroline Rivière (1805–06). The female faces were not at all detailed but were softened, and were notable for their large oval eyes and delicate flesh colours and their rather dreamlike expressions. His portraits typically had simple backgrounds of solid dark or light colour, or of sky. These were the beginning of a series that would make him among the most celebrated portrait artists of the 19th century.

As Ingres waited to depart to Rome, his friend Lorenzo Bartolini introduced him to Italian Renaissance paintings, particularly the works of Bronzino and Pontormo, which Napoleon had brought back from his campaign in Italy and placed in the Louvre. Ingres assimilated their clarity and monumentality into his own portrait style. In the Louvre were also masterpieces of Flemish art, including the Ghent Altarpiece by Jan Van Eyck, which the French army had seized during its conquest of Flanders. The precision of Renaissance Flemish art became part of Ingres's style. Ingres's stylistic eclecticism represented a new tendency in art. The Louvre, newly filled with booty seized by Napoleon in his campaigns in Italy and the Low Countries, provided French artists of the early 19th century with an unprecedented opportunity to study, compare, and copy masterworks from antiquity and from the entire history of European painting. As art historian Marjorie Cohn has written: "At the time, art history as a scholarly enquiry was brand-new. Artists and critics outdid each other in their attempts to identify, interpret, and exploit what they were just beginning to perceive as historical stylistic developments." From the beginning of his career, Ingres freely borrowed from earlier art, adopting the historical style appropriate to his subject, and was consequently accused by critics of plundering the past.

In 1803 he received a prestigious commission, being one of five artists selected (along with Jean-Baptiste Greuze, Robert Lefèvre, Charles Meynier, and Marie-Guillemine Benoist) to paint full-length portraits of Napoleon Bonaparte as First Consul. These were to be distributed to the prefectural towns of Liège, Antwerp, Dunkerque, Brussels, and Ghent, all of which were newly ceded to France in the 1801 Treaty of Lunéville. Napoleon is not known to have granted the artists a sitting, and Ingres's meticulously painted portrait of Bonaparte, First Consul appears to be modelled on an image of Napoleon painted by Antoine-Jean Gros in 1802.

Ingres painted a new portrait of Napoleon for presentation at the 1806 Salon, this one showing Napoleon on the Imperial Throne for his coronation. This painting was entirely different from his earlier portrait of Napoleon as First Consul; it concentrated almost entirely on the lavish imperial costume that Napoleon had chosen to wear, and the symbols of power he held. The scepter of Charles V, the sword of Charlemagne, the rich fabrics, furs and capes, crown of gold leaves, golden chains and emblems were all presented in extremely precise detail; the Emperor's face and hands were almost lost in the majestic costume.

At the Salon, his paintings: Self-Portrait, portraits of the Rivière family, and Napoleon I on his Imperial Throne received a very chilly reception. David delivered a severe judgement, and the critics were hostile. Chaussard (Le Pausanias Français, 1806) praised "the fineness of Ingres's brushwork and the finish", but condemned Ingres's style as gothic and asked:

    How, with so much talent, a line so flawless, an attention to detail so thorough, has M. Ingres succeeded in painting a bad picture? The answer is that he wanted to do something singular, something extraordinary ... M. Ingres's intention is nothing less than to make art regress by four centuries, to carry us back to its infancy, to revive the manner of Jean de Bruges?

After arriving in Rome, Ingres read with mounting indignation the relentlessly negative press clippings sent to him from Paris by his friends. In letters to his prospective father-in-law, he expressed his outrage at the critics: "So the Salon is the scene of my disgrace; ... The scoundrels, they waited until I was away to assassinate my reputation ... I have never been so unhappy....I knew I had many enemies; I never was agreeable with them and never will be. My greatest wish would be to fly to the Salon and to confound them with my works, which don't in any way resemble theirs; and the more I advance, the less their work will resemble mine." He vowed never again to exhibit at the Salon, and his refusal to return to Paris led to the breaking up of his engagement. Julie Forestier, when asked years later why she had never married, responded, "When one has had the honor of being engaged to M. Ingres, one does not marry."

On 23 November 1806, he wrote to Jean Forestier, the father of his former fiancée, "Yes, art will need to be reformed, and I intend to be that revolutionary." Characteristically, he found a studio on the grounds of the Villa Medici away from the other resident artists, and painted furiously. Many drawings of monuments in Rome from this time are attributed to Ingres, but it appears from more recent scholarship that they were actually the work of his collaborators, particularly his friend the landscape artist François-Marius Granet. As required of every winner of the Prix, he sent works at regular intervals to Paris so his progress could be judged. Traditionally fellows sent paintings of male Greek or Roman heroes, but for his first samples Ingres sent Baigneuse à mi-corps (1807), a painting of the back of a young woman bathing, based on an engraving of an antique vase, and La Grande Bagneuse (1808), a larger painting of the back of a nude bather, and the first Ingres model to wear a turban, a detail he borrowed from the Fornarina by his favourite painter, Raphael.

To satisfy the Academy in Paris, he also dispatched Oedipus and the Sphinx to show his mastery of the male nude. The verdict of the academicians in Paris was that the figures were not sufficiently idealized. In later years Ingres painted several variants of these compositions; another nude begun in 1807, the Venus Anadyomene, remained in an unfinished state for decades, to be completed forty years later and finally exhibited in 1855.

During his time in Rome he also produced numerous portraits: Madame Duvauçay, François-Marius Granet, Edme-François-Joseph Bochet, Madame Panckoucke, and that of Madame la Comtesse de Tournon, mother of the prefect of the department of the Tiber. In 1810 Ingres's pension at the Villa Medici ended, but he decided to stay in Rome and seek patronage from the French occupation government.

In 1811 Ingres completed his final student exercise, the immense Jupiter and Thetis, a scene from the Iliad of Homer: the goddess of the Sea, Thetis, pleads with Zeus to act in favor of her son Achilles. The face of the water nymph Salmacis he had drawn years earlier reappeared as Thetis. Ingres wrote with enthusiasm that he had been planning to paint this subject since 1806, and he intended to "deploy all of the luxury of art in its beauty". However, once again, the critics were hostile, finding fault with the exaggerated proportions of the figures and the painting's flat, airless quality.

Although facing uncertain prospects, in 1813 Ingres married a young woman, Madeleine Chapelle, recommended to him by her friends in Rome. After a courtship carried out through correspondence, he proposed without having met her, and she accepted.

Their marriage was happy; Madame Ingres's faith was unwavering. He continued to suffer disparaging reviews, as Don Pedro of Toledo Kissing Henry IV's Sword, Raphael and the Fornarina (Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University), several portraits, and the Interior of the Sistine Chapel met with generally hostile critical response at the Paris Salon of 1814.

After he left the Academy, a few important commissions came to him. The French governor of Rome, General Miollis, a wealthy patron of the arts, asked him to decorate rooms of the Monte Cavallo Palace, a former papal residence, for an expected visit of Napoleon. Ingres painted a large-scale Romulus' Victory Over Acron (1811) for the salon of the Empress and The Dream of Ossian (1813), based on a book of poems that Napoleon admired, for the ceiling of the Emperor's bedroom. General Miollis also commissioned Ingres to paint Virgil reading the Aeneid (1812) for his own residence, the villa Aldobrandini. The painting showed the moment when Virgil predicted the death of Marcellus, the son of Livia, causing Livia to faint. The interior was precisely depicted, following the archeological finds at Pompeii. As usual, Ingres made several versions of the same scene: a three-figure fragment cut from an abandoned version is in the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium in Brussels, and in 1832 he made a drawing in vertical format as a model for a reproductive engraving by Pradier. The General Miollis version was repurchased by Ingres in the 1830s, reworked by assistants under Ingres's direction, and never finished; The Dream of Ossian was likewise repurchased, modified, but left unfinished.

He traveled to Naples in the spring of 1814 to paint Queen Caroline Murat. Joachim Murat, the King of Naples, had earlier purchased the Dormeuse de Naples, a sleeping nude (the original is lost, but several drawings exist, and Ingres later revisited the subject in L'Odalisque à l'esclave). Murat also commissioned two historical paintings, Raphael et la Fornarina and Paolo et Francesca, and what later became one of Ingres's most famous works, La Grande Odalisque, to accompany Dormeuse de Naples. Ingres never received payment, due to the collapse of the Murat regime and execution of Joachim Murat in 1815. With the fall of Napoleon's dynasty, he found himself essentially stranded in Rome without patronage.

Ingres continued to produce masterful portraits, both in pencil and oils, of almost photographic precision; but with the departure of the French administration, the painting commissions were rare. During this low point of his career, Ingres augmented his income by drawing pencil portraits of the many wealthy tourists, in particular the English, passing through postwar Rome. The portrait drawings he produced in such profusion during this period rank today among his most admired works. He is estimated to have made some five hundred portrait drawings, including portraits of his famous friends. His friends included many musicians including Paganini, and he regularly played the violin with others who shared his enthusiasm for Mozart, Haydn, Gluck, and Beethoven.

He also produced a series of small paintings in what was known as the Troubador style, idealized portrayals of events in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. In 1815 he painted Aretino and Charles V's Ambassador as well as Aretino and Tintoretto, an anecdotal painting whose subject, a painter brandishing a pistol at his critic, may have been especially satisfying to the embattled Ingres. Other paintings in the same style included Henry IV Playing with His Children (1817) and the Death of Leonardo.

In 1816 Ingres produced his only etching, a portrait of the French ambassador to Rome, Monsignor Gabriel Cortois de Pressigny. The only other prints he is known to have executed are two lithographs: The Four Magistrates of Besançon, made as an illustration for Baron Taylor's Voyages pittoresques et romantiques dans l'ancienne France, and a copy of La Grande Odalisque, both in 1825.

In 1817 the Count of Blacas, who was ambassador of France to the Holy See, provided Ingres with his first official commission since 1814, for a painting of Christ Giving the Keys to Peter. Completed in 1820, this imposing work was well received in Rome but to the artist's chagrin the ecclesiastical authorities there would not permit it to be sent to Paris for exhibition.

A commission came in 1816 or 1817 from the descendants of the Fernando Álvarez de Toledo, Duke of Alva, for a painting of the Duke receiving papal honours for his repression of the Protestant Reformation. Ingres loathed the subject—he regarded the Duke as one of history's brutes—and struggled to satisfy both the commission and his conscience. After revisions which eventually reduced the Duke to a tiny figure in the background, Ingres left the work unfinished. He entered in his diary, "J'etais forcé par la necessité de peindre un pareil tableau; Dieu a voulu qu'il reste en ebauche." ("I was forced by need to paint such a painting; God wanted it to remain a sketch.)

He continued to send works to the Salon in Paris, hoping to make his breakthrough there. In 1819 he sent his reclining nude, La Grande Odalisque, as well as a history painting, Philip V and the Marshal of Berwick, and Roger Freeing Angelica, based on an episode in the 16th-century epic poem Orlando Furioso by Ariosto but his work was once again condemned by critics as gothic and unnatural.The critic Kératy complained that the Grande Odalisque's back was three vertebrae too long. The critic Charles Landon wrote: "After a moment of attention, one sees that in this figure there are no bones, no muscles, no blood, no life, no relief, no anything which constitutes imitation....it is evident that the artist deliberately erred, that he wanted to do it badly, that he believed in bringing back to life the pure and primitive manner of the painters of Antiquity; but he took for his model a few fragments from earlier periods and a degenerate execution, and completely lost his way."

In 1820 Ingres and his wife moved to Florence at the urging of the Florentine sculptor Lorenzo Bartolini, an old friend from his years in Paris. He still had to depend upon his portraits and drawings for income, but his luck began to change. His history painting Roger Freeing Angelica was purchased for the private collection of Louis XVIII, and was hung in the Musée du Luxembourg in Paris, which was newly devoted to the work of living artists. This was the first work of Ingres to enter a museum.

In 1821 he finished a painting commissioned by a childhood friend, Monsieur de Pastoret, The Entry into Paris of the Dauphin, the Future Charles V; de Pastoret also ordered a portrait of himself and a religious work (Virgin with the Blue Veil). In August 1820, with the help of de Pastoret, he received a commission for a major religious painting for the Cathedral of Montauban. The theme was the re-establishment of the bond between the church and the state. Ingres's painting, The Vow of Louis XIII (1824), inspired by Raphael, was purely in the Renaissance style, and depicted King Louis XIII vowing to dedicate his reign to the Virgin Mary. This was perfectly in tune with the doctrine of the new government of the Restoration. He spent four years bringing the large canvas to completion, and he took it to the Paris Salon in October 1824, where it became the key that finally opened the door of the Paris art establishment and to his career as an official painter.

The Vow of Louis XIII in the Salon of 1824 finally brought Ingres critical success. Although Stendhal complained about "the sort of material beauty which excludes the idea of divinity", most critics praised the work. The journalist and future Prime Minister and French President Adolphe Thiers celebrated the breakthrough of a new style: "Nothing is better than variety like this, the essential character of the new style." In January 1825 he was awarded the Cross of the Légion d'honneur by Charles X, and in June 1825 he was elected a member of Académie des Beaux-Arts. Lithographs of La Grande Odalisque published in 1826 in two competing versions by Delpech and Sudré found eager buyers; Ingres received 24,000 francs for the reproduction rights – twenty times the amount he had been paid for the original painting six years earlier. The 1824 Salon also brought forward a counter-current to the neoclassicism of Ingres: Eugène Delacroix exhibited Les Massacres de Scio, in a romantic style sharply contrasting to that of Ingres.

The success of Ingres's painting led in 1826 to a major new commission, The Apotheosis of Homer, a giant canvas which celebrated all the great artists of history, intended to decorate the ceiling of one of the halls of the Museum Charles X at the Louvre. Ingres was unable to finish the work in time for the 1827 Salon, but displayed the painting in grisaille.The 1827 Salon became a confrontation between the neoclassicism of Ingres's Apotheosis and a new manifesto of romanticism by Delacroix, The Death of Sardanapalus. Ingres joined the battle with enthusiasm; he called Delacroix "the apostle of ugliness" and told friends that he recognized "the talent, the honorable character and distinguished spirit" of Delacroix, but that "he has tendencies which I believe are dangerous and which I must push back."

Despite the considerable patronage he enjoyed under the Bourbon government, Ingres welcomed the July Revolution of 1830.That the outcome of the Revolution was not a republic but a constitutional monarchy was satisfactory to the essentially conservative and pacifistic artist, who in a letter to a friend in August 1830 criticized agitators who "still want to soil and disturb the order and happiness of a freedom so gloriously, so divinely won." Ingres's career was little affected, and he continued to receive official commissions and honors under the July Monarchy.

Ingres exhibited in the Salon of 1833, where his portrait of Louis-François Bertin (1832) was a particular success. The public found its realism spellbinding, although some of the critics declared its naturalism vulgar and its colouring drab. In 1834 he finished a large religious painting, The Martyrdom of Saint Symphorian, which depicted the first saint to be martyred in Gaul. The painting was commissioned in 1824 by the Ministry of the Interior for the Cathedral of Autun, and the iconography in the picture was specified by the bishop. Ingres conceived the painting as the summation of all of his work and skill, and worked on it for ten years before displaying it at the 1834 Salon. He was surprised, shocked and angered by the response; the painting was attacked by both the neoclassicists and by the romantics. Ingres was accused of historical inaccuracy, for the colours, and for the feminine appearance of the Saint, who looked like a beautiful statue. In anger, Ingres announced that he would no longer accept public commissions, and that he would no longer participate in the Salon. He later did participate in some semi-public expositions and a retrospective of his work at the 1855 Paris International Exposition, but never again took part in the Salon or submitted his work for public judgement. Instead, at the end of 1834 he returned to Rome to become the Director of the Academy of France.

Ingres remained in Rome for six years. He devoted much of his attention to the training of the painting students, as he was later to do at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. He re-organized the Academy, increased the size of the library, added many molds of classical statues to the Academy collection, and assisted the students in getting public commissions in both Rome and Paris. He traveled to Orvieto (1835), Sienna (1835), Ravenna and Urbino to study the paleochristian mosaics, medieval murals and Renaissance art. He devoted considerable attention to music, one of the subjects of the academy; he welcomed Franz Liszt and Fanny Mendelssohn. He formed a long friendship with Liszt. The composer Charles Gounod, who was a pensioner at the time at the Academy, described Ingres's appreciation of modern music, including Weber and Berlioz, and his adoration for Beethoven, Haydn, Mozart and Gluck. He joined the music students and his friend Niccolò Paganini in playing Beethoven's violin works. Gounod wrote that Ingres "had the tenderness of an infant and the indignation of an apostle." When Stendhal visited the Academy and disparaged Beethoven, Ingres turned to the doorman, indicated Stendahl, and told him, "If this gentleman ever calls again, I am not here."

His rancor against the Paris art establishment for his failure at the 1834 Salon did not abate. In 1836 he refused a major commission from the French Minister of the Interior, Adolphe Thiers, to decorate the interior of the Church of the Madeleine in Paris, because the commission had been offered first to a rival, Paul Delaroche, who refused it. He did complete a small number of works which he sent to patrons in Paris. One was L'Odalisque et l'esclave, (1839), a portrait of a blonde odalisque, or member of a harem, who reclines languorously while a turbaned musician plays. This fitted into the popular genre of orientalism; his rival Eugène Delacroix had created a painting on a similar theme, Les Femmes d'Alger, for the 1834 Salon. The setting was inspired by Persian miniatures and was full of exotic detail, but the woman's long reclining form was pure Ingres. The critic Théophile Gautier wrote of Ingres's work: "It is impossible to better paint the mystery, the silence and the suffocating atmosphere of the seraglio." In 1842 he painted a second version, nearly identical to the first but with a landscape background (painted by his student Paul Flandrin)

The second painting he sent, in 1840, was The Illness of Antiochus (1840; also known as Aniochus and Stratonice) a history painting on a theme of love and sacrifice, a theme once painted by David in 1800, when Ingres was in his studio. It was commissioned by the Duc d'Orleans, the son of King Louis Philippe I), and had very elaborate architectural background designed by one of the Academy students, Victor Baltard, the future architect of the Paris market Les Halles. The central figure was an ethereal woman in white, whose contemplative pose with her hand on her chin recurs in some of Ingres's female portraits.

His painting of Aniochius and Stratonice, despite its small size, just one meter, was a major success for Ingres. In August it was shown in the private apartment of the duc d'Orléans in the Pavilion Marsan of the Palais des Tuileries. The King greeted him personally at Versailles and gave him a tour of the Palace. He was offered a commission to paint a portrait of the Duke, the heir to the throne, and another from the Duc de Lunyes to create two huge murals for the Château de Dampierre. In April 1841 he returned definitively to Paris.

One of the first works executed after his return to Paris was a portrait of the duc d'Orléans. After the heir to the throne was killed in a carriage accident a few months after the painting was completed in 1842, Ingres received commissions to make additional copies. He also received a commission to design seventeen stained glass windows for the chapel on the place where the accident occurred, and a commission for eight additional stained-glass designs for Orléans chapel in Dreux. He became a professor at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. He took his students frequently to the Louvre to see the classical and Renaissance art, instructing them to look straight ahead and to avoid the works of Rubens, which he believed deviated too far from the true values of art.

The Revolution of 1848, which overthrew Louis Philippe and created the French Second Republic, had little effect on his work or his ideas. He declared that the revolutionaries were "cannibals who called themselves French", but during the Revolution completed his Vénus Anadyoméne, which he had started as an academic study in 1808. It represented Venus, rising from the sea which had given birth to her, surrounded by cherubs. He welcomed the patronage of the new government of Louis-Napoleon, who would in 1852 become Emperor Napoleon III.

1849 Ingres lost his wife and in October 1851 he resigned as professor at the École des Beaux-Arts.

In 1852, Ingres, then seventy-one years of age, married forty-three-year-old Delphine Ramel, a relative of his friend Marcotte d'Argenteuil. Ingres was rejuvenated, and in the decade that followed he completed several significant works, including the portrait of Princesse Albert de Broglie.

In 1853 he began the Apotheosis of Napoleon I, for the ceiling of a hall in the Hôtel de Ville, Paris. (It was destroyed in May 1871 when the Paris Commune set fire to the building.) With the help of assistants, in 1854 he completed another history painting, Joan of Arc at the Coronation of Charles VII. A retrospective of his works was featured at the Paris Universal Exposition of 1855, and in the same year Napoleon III named him a Grand Officer of the Légion d'honneur.

He continued to rework and refine his classic themes. In 1856 Ingres completed The Source (The Spring), a painting begun in 1820 and closely related to his Venus Anadyoméne. He painted two versions of Louis XIV and Molière (1857 and 1860), and produced variant copies of several of his earlier compositions. These included religious works in which the figure of the Virgin from The Vow of Louis XIII was reprised: The Virgin of the Adoption of 1858 was followed by The Virgin Crowned  and The Virgin with Child.

In 1859 he produced new versions of The Virgin of the Host, and in 1862 he completed Christ and the Doctors, a work commissioned many years before by Queen Marie Amalie for the chapel of Bizy. He painted small replicas of Paolo and Francesca and Oedipus and the Sphinx. In 1862 he completed a small oil-on-paper version of The Golden Age.

The last of his important portrait paintings date from this period: Marie-Clothilde-Inés de Foucauld, Madame Moitessier, Seated (1856), Self-Portrait at the Age of Seventy-eight and Madame J.-A.-D. Ingres, both completed in 1859. At the request of the Uffizi Gallery of Florence, he made his own-self portrait in 1858. The only colour in the painting is the red of his rosette of the Legion of Honour.

In 1862 he was awarded the title of Senator, and made a member of the Imperial Council on Public Instruction. Three of his works were shown in the London International Exhibition, and his reputation as a major French painter was confirmed once more.

Near the end of his life, he made one of his best-known masterpieces, The Turkish Bath. It reprised a figure and theme he had been paint.

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres est né à Montauban le 29 août 17802. Son père, le peintre et sculpteur Jean-Marie-Joseph Ingres, a favorisé ses penchants artistiques. Il entre en 1791 à l’Académie de Toulouse où il est formé par Jean Suau, puis se rend à Paris, en 1796, pour étudier sous la direction de Jacques-Louis David. Il s’éloigne de son néo-classicisme par son dévouement à un idéal de beauté fondé sur de difficiles harmonies de lignes et de couleurs. Il peint le portrait d'amis ainsi que de Pierre-François Bernier, qu'il connaît de Montauban. Il remporte le prix de Rome à sa deuxième tentative en 1801 avec Les Ambassadeurs d'Agamemnon, mais il ne peut s'y rendre immédiatement. Il s'installe avec d'autres élèves de David à l'ancien couvent des Capucines où il peint principalement des portraits.

En juin 1806, il se fiance avec Marie-Anne-Julie Forestier, mais sa relation ne résiste pas à son absence après son départ pour Rome en septembre.

En 1806, Ingres découvre à Rome, Raphaël et le Quattrocento, qui marquent définitivement son style. Ces années de travail sont les plus fécondes avec les nus, parmi lesquels La Baigneuse, les paysages, les dessins, les portraits et les compositions historiques. Il est en pleine possession de son art et son séjour à Rome est aussi l'occasion de tisser des liens amicaux avec les grands commis de l'administration impériale : le comte de Tournon et sa mère, Edme Bochet et sa sœur Cécile Bochet madame Henry Panckoucke, Hippolyte-François Devillers, le baron de Montbreton de Norvins. En France, cependant, ses toiles peintes en Italie ne plaisent pas. L’artiste décide alors de rester à Rome. Il se marie en 1813 avec Madeleine Chapelle (1782-1849), une jeune modiste habitant Guéret. Ingres réalisa dix portraits de sa femme. Mais le plus célèbre tableau sur lequel elle apparait est Le Bain turc. Madeleine pose pour l'odalisque aux bras levés qui s'étire au premier plan. Le tableau a été réalisé en 1862, après la mort de Madeleine. Elle fut peinte d'après un croquis qu'Ingres avait réalisé en 1818. En 1850, il va à Châlons chez sa belle-mère pour connaître les lieux où sa femme a vécu, et y rencontre le notaire Louois Changy. Il semble y être retourné l'année suivante.

À la chute de Napoléon Ier, des difficultés économiques et familiales l’entraînent dans une période financièrement difficile pendant laquelle il peint, avec acharnement, tout ce qu’on lui commande. Il sollicite ses amitiés romaines et ses bonnes relations avec les Panckoucke et les Bochet lui présentent Charles Marcotte d'Argenteuil, ami de Jacques-Édouard Gatteaux, ami proche d'Ingres. Très vite, Charles Marcotte d'Argenteuil devient un proche du peintre, jusqu'à devenir un de ses principaux mécènes jusqu'à son décès en 1864. Après la mort de Madeleine, ce dernier ira même jusqu'à lui présenter sa nièce, Delphine Ramel, qu'Ingres épousera le 15 avril 1852. De ce mariage, viendra la décision d'acheter la maison de Meung-sur-Loire avec son nouveau beau-frère, Jean-François Guille, notaire et conseiller général du Loiret, où il se retirera tous les étés pour bénéficier de la douceur et de la lumière de la Loire.

Nombre de membres de la famille Marcotte seront de fidèles acheteurs, comme Philippe Marcotte de Quivières et ses frères Marcotte de Sainte-Marie et Marcotte de Genlis, le baron Charles Athanase Walckenaer, Alexandre Legentil et le baron Hubert Rohault de Fleury (tous deux initiateurs du projet de la basilique du Sacré-Cœur de Montmartre), Cécile Bochet, devenue madame Henry Panckoucke et baronne Morande-Forgeot, et le clan Ramel.

En 1820, il quitte Rome pour Florence où il réside jusqu'en 1824.

Il trouve finalement le succès en France avec son Vœu de Louis XIII exposé au Salon de 1824, destiné à la cathédrale de Montauban. Il devient directeur de l’Académie de France à Rome de 1835 à 1840. Appelé, le 25 mai 1862, à faire partie du Sénat impérial, il y vota jusqu'à sa mort conformément aux vœux du pouvoir. Il avait été élevé au grade de grand officier de la Légion d'honneur le 14 novembre 1855.

Ingres attache au dessin une grande importance et déclarait à ce sujet : « Une chose bien dessinée est toujours assez bien peinte. » La galerie de portraits réalistes qu’il laisse, constitue un miroir de la société bourgeoise de son temps, de l’esprit et des mœurs d’une classe à laquelle il appartient et dont il trace les vertus et les limites. Ingres s’intéresse beaucoup à la texture des vêtements et des étoffes (velours, soie, satin, cachemire…) qu’il intègre dans ses œuvres afin de noter la classe sociale du personnage. Il s’inspire, à ses débuts, de l'esthétique de l’art grec, avant de se tourner vers une approche plus souple des courbes et des drapés. Ingres n'hésitait pas à accentuer l'anatomie de ses modèles pour atteindre son idéal de beauté ; ainsi, il rajouta trois vertèbres à sa Grande Odalisque.

Ingres reçoit à partir de 1824 honneurs et commandes officielles. Il n'abandonne cependant pas le portrait dont celui de Monsieur Bertin, de 1832, est un sommet.

Le rejet par la critique et par le public, de sa dernière peinture d'histoire Le Martyre de Saint Symphorien exposée au Salon de 1834, le détermine à accepter la direction de l'Académie de France à Rome, où il reste jusqu'en 1845. De retour à Paris, il peint à nouveau des portraits et reçoit à nouveau des commandes de grandes œuvres décoratives .

Il se détache du néo-classicisme par la subordination de la forme à l'expression, simplifiant ou déformant l'anatomie pour se rapprocher de l'expression du caractère individuel. Il s'oppose aussi à l'enseignement officiel sur la nature du beau idéal. Pour l'Académie, celui-ci se traduit par un jeu de proportions canoniques, et la profondeur du savoir du peintre s'obtient par la connaissance de l'anatomie artistique, tandis qu'Ingres réprouve l'étude de l'intérieur du corps humain au profit de l'observation fine de la morphologie10, qui aboutit à représenter non pas un idéal générique, mais celui correspondant à l'individualité du modèle, et pratique la simplification des formes, condamnant la représentation du détail à l'intérieur du modelé.

Dominique Ingres est aussi violoniste et devient, durant un temps, deuxième violon à l’Orchestre du Capitole de Toulouse. De ce loisir est née l’expression « violon d’Ingres ».

James Tissot was a French painter and illustrator. He was a successful painter of Paris society before moving to London in 1871, where he became famous as a genre painter of fashionably dressed women shown in various scenes of everyday life. Toward the end of his life, he dedicated all his time to painting scenes and characters from the Bible after a revelation in 1888.

1856: From Nante to Paris

​James Tissot was born in Nantes, a bustling sea port in a well to do family of successful drapery business. 
By the time Tissot was 17, he knew he wanted to pursue painting as a career despite his father's opposition.
An acquired Anglophile, he began using James as his first name instead of his own given name Jacques and 1854 he was commonly known as James Tissot.

In 1856 or 1857, Tissot travelled to Paris to pursue an education in art at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts as well as studying in the studios of Hippolyte Flandrin and Louis Lamothe.  He also studied on his own by copying works at the Louvre, as did most other artists of the time in their early years. Around this time, Tissot  made the acquaintance of the American painter James McNeill Whistler, and French painters Edgar Degas with whom he would maintain long term friendship.

In 1859, Tissot exhibited in the Paris Salon for the first time. He showed five paintings of scenes from the Middle Ages, many depicting scenes from Goethe's Faust. These works show the influence in his work of the Belgian painter Henri Leys (Jan August Hendrik Leys), whom Tissot had met in Antwerp earlier that same year. Other influences include the works of the German painters Peter von Cornelius and Moritz Retzsch.  

The French government paid 5,000 francs for his painting La Renconcontre de Faust et de Marguerite (The Meeting of Faust and Marguerite) in 1860.

That same year, the young James Tissot travelled to both Italy and London, and just a few years later, the period of his interest changed suddenly from Medieval times to his own times, and his subject matters also changed to the daily life scenes of modern fashionable women. Because of that, James Tissot quickly acquired fame ,fortune as well as high critical acclaim.

Meanwhile, like contemporaries such as Alfred Stevens and Claude Monet, Tissot also explored japonisme, including Japanese objects and costumes in his pictures and expressing style influence.

1871: From Paris to London:

In 1970, the Franco-Prussian War broke out, James Tissot fought for his country in two regimes before he moved to London, said to have only 100 francs on him, but certainly with enough artistic and social connections from his earlier traveling and art exhibitions there to reestablish himself.

As he did in Paris almost a decade later, James Tissot focus his effort on depicting beautiful women in their elegant dresses doing ladylike things, that winning formula quickly enabled him to buy a house in the area of St. John's Wood in London, where he had 'a studio with a waiting room where, at all times, there is iced champagne at the disposal of visitors', according to ​Edmond de Goncourt, one of the Goncourt brothers.

In 1875-6, James Tissot met and fell in love with Kathleen Newton, an Irish divorcee. She moved into Tissot's household in St. John's Wood in 1876 and became the painter's mistress and muse. They lived together in a semi recluse status until her death in 1882 due to Tuberculosis. Tissot frequently referred to these years with Newton as the happiest of his life, a time when he was able to live out his dream of a family life.

1882: From London to Paris:

On 9 November 1882, Kathleen Newton killed herself after her consumption got worse and worse daily, and just a week later, James Tissot left London, never to return in his life time.

After returning to Paris, James Tissot tried to reestablish himself yet again with women as his protagonists, but this time in different styles, social contexts and much larger scale. 

In 1885,Tissot chose 15 of those large paintings for a major exhibition at the Galerie Sedelmeyer, and would call them all La Femme à Paris, representing women of different  social classes as well as physical traits engaged in yet seemed aloof from a variety of social scenes and activities, from balls to circus to shops and music gardens. Unlike his previous women who idled away their life in relative solitude or familiar ambiance like decoration, the women portrayed in this series seemed a different type of Femme Nouvelle, who went out, living their life and had their own thoughts, ideas dreams.

The series of  La Femme à Paris also showed James Tissot's increasing affection of Japanese art, fashion and aesthetics, as he sometimes used unexpected angles  and framing (like Degas with his ballet dancers) from that tradition, as if he were standing from a very close, at times intimate distance, looking at his objects.

1885-1886: Dedication to Bible:Between 1885-1886, while working on his paintings Musique sacrée, one of his series of La Femme à Paris, James Tissot had a mystic vision, that rekindled his faith in Catholic religion, and he would dedicate the rest of his life to depicting the scenes of Bible.

At a time when French artists were working in impressionism, pointillism, and heavy oil washes, Tissot was moving toward realism in his watercolors. To assist in his completion of biblical illustrations, Tissot traveled to the Middle East in 1886, 1889, and 1896 to make studies of the landscape and people.

His series of 365 gouache (opaque watercolor) illustrations showing the life of Christ were shown to critical acclaim and enthusiastic audiences in Paris (1894–5), London (1896) and New York (1898–9), before being bought by the Brooklyn Museum in 1900. They were published in a French edition in 1896–7 and in an English one in 1897–8, bringing Tissot vast wealth and fame. During July 1894, Tissot was awarded the Légion d'honneur, France's most prestigious medal.

James ​Tissot spent the last years of his life working on paintings of subjects from the Old Testament.  Although he never completed the series, he exhibited 80 of these paintings in Paris in 1901.

1902: DeathThe religious graphic works James Tissot created the last phase of his life not only deviated dramatically in terms of subject matters, but also demonstrated a completely different sensibility. One can even say they were done someone else other than James Tissot himself, a portraitist of belle époque elegance. It seems as if the reawakening of his religious belief had not only changed his soul, but also his paint brush.

On 8 August 1902, James Tissot died in Doubs, France in the Château de Buillon, a former abbey which he had inherited from his father in 1888. His grave is in the chapel sited within the grounds of the chateau.

Widespread use of his illustrations in literature and slides continued after his death with The Life of Christ and The Old Testament becoming the "definitive Bible images". His images provided a foundation for contemporary films such as the lifestyle themes in The Age of Innocence (1993). In the first half of the 20th century, there was a re-kindling of interest in his portraits of fashionable ladies and some fifty years later, these were achieving record prices.

John William Godward (9 August 1861 – 13 December 1922) was an English painter from the end of the Neo-Classicist era. He was a protégé of Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema but his style of painting fell out of favor with the rise of modern art. He committed suicide at the age of 61 and is said to have written in his suicide note that "the world is not big enough for myself and a Picasso".
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His estranged family, who had disapproved of his becoming an artist, were ashamed of his suicide and burned his papers. Only one photograph of Godward is known to survive.

John William Godward was born on 9 August 1861. His father was an investment clerk at the Law Life Assurance Society in London, and the family eventually lived in Wimbledon.

Being the firstborn and the oldest son, it was assumed that Godward would follow his father into the world of insurance. Even though Godward was already showing more interest in his creative side, he found himself training to be an insurance clerk.

But when Godward’s father decided to offer him a job, John Williams Godward refused, so his father arranged for him to train as an architect – a much more lucrative, respectable career than a simple artist.
Between 1879 and 1881, Godward studied under William Wontner, a family friend who was also an architect and designer. But happily for Godward, he \worked alongside Wontner’s son, William Clarke Wontner, himself a painter who would go on to become a popular painter of landscapes and murals.

As for Godward’s own artistic training, it’s not known where he trained and with whom. There are no records of him at the Royal Academy Schools. However, it could be that Godward was helped in some way by William Clarke Wonter who, in 1885, was teaching at the St John’s Wood Art School, whose students typically went on to the Royal Academy Schools.

His first work dates from around 1880, and in 1887, Godward had one of his paintings, ‘The Yellow Turban’, accepted at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition. 

​Godward greatly admired the leading Classicists of the time; Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema’s influence can be seen in Godward’s use of marble and textiles, and that of Sir Frederic Leighton can be seen in the glossy finish of his paintings.

Like Alma-Tadema, who was not only a painter but also an archaeologist who visited historical sites, Godward, too, meticulously studied details such as architecture and dress to give his work authenticity. He also painstakingly studied any feature he used in his paintings, from wild flowers to animal skins.

By 1921, with his health failing, suffering from depression and no longer enchanted with Italy, he returned to England. But the country he returned to was no longer interested in the Classical style. In fact, it proved to be nothing short of hostile toward his style of art. As the world’s artistic preference started to embrace modern art, Godward would become one of the last, best European Classical painters.
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Although not as prolific as he had been, Godward continued painting. What was possibly his last completed work, titled, ‘Contemplation’, was sold to a firm of art dealers. 

Godward chose to end his life on 13th December 1922. According to the newspaper report of his death, the cheque for his last painting Contemplation had been left pinned to his door.

Books

John William Godward: The Eclipse of Classicism

John William Godward was a passionate and extremely accomplished practitioner of the 19th century Graeco-Roman Classic style. Swanson's book describes an enigmatic, tormented personality and confirms Godward's intense, if narrow, genius.
American author and art historian Vern Grosvenor Swanson interviewed three remost family members of John William Godward in order to write this book

John William Waterhouse was an English painter known for working first in the Academic style and for then embracing the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood's style and subject matter. His artworks were known for their depictions of women from both ancient Greek mythology and Arthurian legend.

Born in Rome to English parents who were both painters, Waterhouse later moved to London, where he enrolled in the Royal Academy of Art. He soon began exhibiting at their annual summer exhibitions, focusing on the creation of large canvas works depicting scenes from the daily life and mythology of ancient Greece.

1849: birth

John William Waterhouse was born in the city of Rome to the English painters William and Isabella Waterhouse in 1849, and his early life in Italy has been cited as one of the reasons many of his later paintings were set in ancient Rome or based upon scenes taken from Roman mythology.

In 1854, Waterhouses' parents returned to England and moved to a newly built house in South Kensington, London. Waterhouse was encouraged to draw, and often sketched artworks that he found in the British Museum and the National Gallery.

​In 1871 he entered the Royal Academy of Art school, initially to study sculpture, before moving on to painting.

John William Waterhouse's early works were not Pre-Raphaelite in nature, but were of classical themes in the spirit of Alma-Tadema and Frederic Leighton.

In 1874 his painting Sleep and his Half-brother Death was exhibited at the Royal Academy summer exhibition. The painting was a success and Waterhouse would exhibit at the annual exhibition every year until 1916, with the exception of 1890 and 1915. 

In 1883 Waterhouse married Esther Kenworthy, the daughter of an art schoolmaster from Ealing who had exhibited her own flower-paintings at the Royal Academy and elsewhere.

​In 1895 Waterhouse was elected to the status of full Academician. He taught at the St. John's Wood Art School, joined the St John's Wood Arts Club, and served on the Royal Academy Council.

One of Waterhouse's best known subjects is The Lady of Shalott, a study of Elaine of Astolat as depicted in the 1832 poem by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, who dies of a mysterious curse after looking directly at the beautiful Lancelot. He actually painted three different versions of this character, in 1888, 1894, and 1916. 

Jayne Wrightsman is an American art collector, philanthropist, and the widow of Charles B. Wrightsman, an American oil executive who passed away in 1986.

Jayne was born in Michigan and when she was 12, her parents divorced and her mother took her and her siblings to Los Angeles, where Jane re-named herself “Jayne”.

After graduating from high school, she worked several different jobs: as a swimsuit model, selling gloves at Saks department store, or as an extra in Hollywood movies. Beautiful at young age, she was pursued by aspiring actors including Cary Grant, playboys, and heirs who took her to expensive restaurants and parties.

There are different versions as to how Jayne met her husband Charles Wrightsman, the president of Standard Oil of Kansas, one version is that she met him in one of the parties she was taken by one of her dates, but another version is more entertaining: while working as a swimsuit model at a department store, Jayne caught the attention of the Oklahoma oil baron, Charles Wrightsman, who reportedly said: 'I want that - the girl, not the suit.'

They were married on March 28, 1944 and settled in Palm Beach, Florida. Soon afterwards the couple acquired Blythedunes – a massive ocean-front, 28-room mansion designed by Maurice Fatio which previously belonged to another style icon Mona von Bismarck.

There in Palm Beach the couple became friends with their neighbours, Joseph and Rose Kennedy who introduced them to their son Senator John F. Kennedy and his wife Jacqueline. For a time, John Kennedy stayed at the Wrightsman home for almost a month, taking daily swims in their saline permanently heated pool  to ease his backache.

With her love of art, history and everything French, Jayne Wrightsman became friend with Jacqueline Kennedy and later her mentor in decorative art. It was she who introduced the famous French decorator Stephane Boudin to Jacqueline. When Jacqueline became First Lady, she asked Jayne to help with her restoration of the White House. 

When Jacqueline was no longer First Lady, she continued to keep her friendship with Jayne.  According to Marella Agnelli, yet another style icon and wife of Gianni Agnelli: "It was a cultural friendship", not an intimate one. As both women were famous being extremely private.

After their marriage, Charles Wrightsman became a Pygmalion to his wife, he hired tutors to teach her etiquettes, proper English as well as French, art and history, and spent fortunes to dress her in the best haute couture designers at the time: Balenciaga, Christian Dior, Givenchy, etc., and thus transformed her into an art connoisseur and style icon. 

Vogue  magazine started to take her photos with their photographers Horst. P. Horst and Cecil Beaton, and in 1965, Jayne entered into International Best Dressed List Hall of Fame of another woman's magazine Vanity Fair.

After her husband’s death in 1986 at the age of 90, Mrs. Wrightsman continued her patronage of the Met, as well as the British Museum, the Louvre, and the Hermitage.

Jayne Wrightsman died on 20 April 2019 in her New York home on 820 Fifth Avenue. She has no children.

Jean-Antoine Houdon was born in Versailles, on 25 March 1741.

In 1752, he entered the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture, where he studied with René-Michel Slodtz, Jean-Baptiste Lemoyne, and Jean-Baptiste Pigalle. From 1761 to 1764, he studied at the École royale des élèves protégés.
Houdon won the Prix de Rome in 1761, but was not greatly influenced by ancient and Renaissance art in Rome. His stay in the city is marked by two characteristic and important productions: the superb écorché (1767), an anatomical model which has served as a guide to all artists since his day, and the statue of Saint Bruno in the church of Santa Maria degli Angeli e dei Martiri in Rome.

After ten years stay in Italy, Houdon returned to Paris.

He submitted Morpheus to the Salon of 1771. He developed his practise of portrait busts. He became a member of the Académie de peinture et de sculpture in 1771, and a professor in 1778. In 1778, he modeled Voltaire, producing a portrait bust with wig for the Comédie-Française; one for the Palace of Versailles, and one for Catherine the Great.

​On 1 July 1786, ​Jean-Antoine Houdon married Marie-Ange-Cecile Langlois; they had three daughters: Sabine, Anne-Ange, and Claudine.
This Bust of Dorothea Schlözer reflects neoclassical elements in the simple drapery the figure wears, which recalls ancient dress rather than the clothing of the time. Her face also is expressionless and the whole sculpture is simple without any excess ornamentation. Although he never fully embraced it, Houdon was probably one of the French sculptors who best exemplified neoclassicism in his later works.
Perceived as bourgeois for his connections to the court of Louis XVI, Houdon fell out of favour during the French Revolution, although he escaped imprisonment. He returned to favor during the French Consulate and Empire period, being taken on as one of the original artistic team for what became the Column of the Grande Armée at Wimille. He was made a Chevalier de la Légion d'honneur, on 17 December 1804.

Johannes Vermeer (October 1632 – December 1675), in original Dutch Jan Vermeer van Delft, was a Dutch Baroque Period painter who specialized in domestic interior scenes of middle class life. During his lifetime, he was a moderately successful provincial genre painter, recognized in Delft and The Hague. 

Vermeer worked slowly and with great care, and frequently used very expensive pigments. He is particularly renowned for his masterly treatment and use of light in his work.

"Almost all his paintings," Hans Koningsberger wrote, "are apparently set in two smallish rooms in his house in Delft; they show the same furniture and decorations in various arrangements and they often portray the same people, mostly women."

His modest celebrity gave way to obscurity after his death. In the 19th century, Vermeer was rediscovered by Gustav Friedrich Waagen and Théophile Thoré-Bürger, who published an essay attributing 66 pictures to him, although only 34 paintings are universally attributed to him today. Since that time, Vermeer's reputation has grown, and he is now acknowledged as one of the greatest painters of the Dutch Golden Age.

Like some major Dutch Golden Age artists such as Frans Hals and Rembrandt, Vermeer never went abroad. However, like Rembrandt, he was an avid art collector and dealer.

Relatively little was known about Vermeer's life until recently. He seems to have been devoted exclusively to his art, living out his life in the city of Delft. Until the 19th century, the only sources of information were some registers, a few official documents, and comments by other artists; for this reason, Thoré-Bürger named him "The Sphinx of Delft". 

Johannes Vermeer was baptized within the Reformed Church on 31 October 1632. His father, named Reijnier Janszoon, was a middle-class worker of silk or caffa (a mixture of silk and cotton or wool). Around 1625, Reijnier began dealing in paintings.  When Reijnier died in October 1652, Vermeer took over the operation of the family's art business.

In April 1653, Johannes Reijniersz Vermeer married a Catholic woman, Catharina Bolenes (Bolnes).

Vermeer's new mother-in-law Maria Thins was significantly wealthier than he, and it was probably she who insisted that Vermeer convert to Catholicism before the marriage on 5 April.

At some point, the couple moved in with Catharina's mother, who lived in a rather spacious house at Oude Langendijk, almost next to a hidden Jesuit church. Here Vermeer lived for the rest of his life, producing paintings in the front room on the second floor.

His wife gave birth to 15 children, four of whom were buried before being baptized, but were registered as "child of Johan Vermeer". 

It is unclear where and with whom Vermeer apprenticed as a painter. Vermeer's style is similar to that of some of the Utrecht Caravaggists, whose works are depicted as paintings-within-paintings in the backgrounds of several of his compositions.

On 29 December 1653, Vermeer became a member of the Guild of Saint Luke, a trade association for painters. The guild's records make clear that Vermeer did not pay the usual admission fee. It was a year of plague, war, and economic crisis; Vermeer was not alone in experiencing difficult financial circumstances.

In 1662, Vermeer was elected head of the guild and was reelected in 1663, 1670, and 1671, evidence that he was considered an established craftsman among his peers. Vermeer worked slowly, probably producing three paintings a year on order.

In 1672, a severe economic downturn (the "Year of Disaster") struck the Netherlands, after Louis XIV and a French army invaded the Dutch Republic from the south (known as the Franco-Dutch War).

In 1674, Vermeer was listed as a member of the civic guards. In the summer of 1675, Vermeer borrowed 1,000 guilders in Amsterdam from Jacob Romboutsz, an Amsterdam silk trader, using his mother-in-law's property as a surety.

In December 1675, Vermeer died after a short illness. He was buried in the Protestant Old Church on 15 December 1675. In a petition to her creditors, his wife later described his death as follows:

"...during the ruinous war with France he not only was unable to sell any of his art but also, to his great detriment, was left sitting with the paintings of other masters that he was dealing in. As a result and owing to the great burden of his children having no means of his own, he lapsed into such decay and decadence, which he had so taken to heart that, as if he had fallen into a frenzy, in a day and a half he went from being healthy to being dead."

Catharina Bolnes attributed her husband's death to the stress of financial pressures. The collapse of the art market damaged Vermeer's business as both a painter and an art dealer. She had to raise 11 children and therefore asked the High Court to relieve her of debts owed to Vermeer's creditors.

Dutch microscopist Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, who worked for the city council as a surveyor, was appointed trustee.The house had eight rooms on the first floor, the contents of which were listed in an inventory taken a few months after Vermeer's death. In his studio, there were two chairs, two painter's easels, three palettes, 10 canvases, a desk, an oak pull table, a small wooden cupboard with drawers, and "rummage not worthy being itemized".Nineteen of Vermeer's paintings were bequeathed to Catharina and her mother. The widow sold two more paintings to Hendrick van Buyten to pay off a substantial debt.

Vermeer had been a respected artist in Delft, but he was almost unknown outside his hometown. A local patron named Pieter van Ruijven had purchased much of his output, which reduced the possibility of his fame spreading.Several factors contributed to his limited body of work. Vermeer never had any pupils; Additionally, his family obligations with so many children may have taken up much of his time, as would acting as both an art-dealer and inn-keeper in running the family businesses. His time spent serving as head of the guild and his extraordinary precision as a painter may have also limited his output.

The color:

In Vermeer's oeuvre, only about 20 pigments have been detected. Of these 20 pigments, seven principal pigments which Vermeer commonly employed include lead white, yellow ochre, vermilion, madder lake, green earth, raw umber, and ivory or bone black.
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Vermeer may have first executed his paintings tonally like most painters of his time, using either monochrome shades of grey ("grisaille") or a limited palette of browns and greys ("dead coloring"), over which he would apply more saturated colors (reds, yellows and blues) in the form of transparent glazes. No drawings have been positively attributed to Vermeer, and his paintings offer few clues to preparatory methods.

There is no other 17th-century artist who employed the exorbitantly expensive pigment lapis lazuli (natural ultramarine) either so lavishly or so early in his career. Vermeer used this in not just elements that are naturally of this colour; the earth colours umber and ochre should be understood as warm light within a painting's strongly lit interior, which reflects its multiple colours onto the wall. In this way, he created a world more perfect than any he had witnessed. This working method most probably was inspired by Vermeer's understanding of Leonardo's observations that the surface of every object partakes of the colour of the adjacent object.This means that no object is ever seen entirely in its natural colour.

A comparable but even more remarkable, yet effectual, use of natural ultramarine is in The Girl with the Wine Glass. The shadows of the red satin dress are underpainted in natural ultramarine, and, owing to this underlying blue paint layer, the red lake and vermilion mixture applied over it acquires a slightly purple, cool and crisp appearance that is most powerful.

Even after Vermeer's supposed financial breakdown following the so-called rampjaar (year of disaster) in 1672, he continued to employ natural ultramarine generously, such as in Lady Seated at a Virginal. 

The genre:
Vermeer's works are largely genre pieces and portraits, with the exception of two cityscapes and two allegories. His subjects offer a cross-section of seventeenth-century Dutch society, ranging from the portrayal of a simple milkmaid at work, to the luxury and splendour of rich notables and merchantmen in their roomy houses. Besides these subjects, religious, poetical, musical, and scientific comments can also be found in his work.

Vermeer's reputation and works have been featured in both literature and in films such as Girl with a Pearl Earring. Tracy Chevalier's novel Girl with a Pearl Earring (1999), and the 2003 film of the same name, present a fictional account of Vermeer's creation of the famous painting and his relationship with the equally fictional model.​

Jacques Fath (6 September 1912 in Maisons-Laffitte, France – 13 November 1954 in Paris, France) was a French fashion designer who was considered one of the three dominant influences on postwar haute couture, the others being Christian Dior and Pierre Balmain. 

Jacques Fath came from a creative family. His paternal great-grandparents, Caroline and Georges Fath, were fashion illustrators and writers, and his paternal grandfather, Rene-Maurice Fath, was a landscape painter.

Fath presented his first collection in 1937, working out of a two-room salon on Rue de la Boetie. 

Two years later in 1939, Jacques Fath married Geneviève Boucher. The bride was a photographer's model who had been Coco Chanel's secretary. They had one son, Philippe (born 1943). According to Fath's friend Princess Giovanna Pignatelli Aragona Cortés, Geneviève Fath, who directed the business side of her husband's firm during his lifetime, was a lesbian

Fath´s  studio was later moved to a second location on Rue Francois Premier in 1940 before settling into a third location at 39 Avenue Pierre 1er de Serbie in 1944. Among his models was Lucie Daouphars (1921 or 1922–1963), a.k.a. Lucky, a former welder who eventually became the top house model for Christian Dior.

Besides designing for his own fashion house, Jacques Fath also designed costumes for several films:

Entre onze heures et minuit (1948, directed by Henri Decoin)
Quai des orfèvres (1947, directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot)
The Red Shoes (1948, costumes for Moira Shearer)
La minute de vérité (1952)
Genevieve (1953, costumes for Kay Kendall)
Abdullah the Great (1955)

Jacques Fath was diagnosed with leukemia in 1952 and died two years later in 1954. His fashion house was operated in its last days by his widow Geneviève Fath, who presented her firstwell-regarded collection for the fashion house in 1955, but The Fath design house closed in 1957, and after the company's haute couture operations ceased, it went into business producing perfumes, gloves, hosiery, and other accessories.

Relaunched by the France Luxury Group in 1992, Jacques Fath was purchased and sold several times over the next decade.
In 2002, the firm became part of the Alliance Designers Group, but the company was sold again in 2006.