Painted Ladies

Ribeiro, Aileen

I don't have an account

Create an account to save content, highlights, and notes to your personal bookshelf.

If you do not have access to the eBook content on the A&AePortal via an institutional subscription, you can purchase an individual subscription from your account. Learn more about subscriptions.

Purchase a subscription

Save Cite Share

Free

Painted Ladies

Aileen Ribeiro

Description: Ingres in Fashion: Representations of Dress and Appearance in Ingres’s Images...

Ingres in Fashion: Representations of Dress and Appearance in Ingres’s Images of Women

HAVING LOOKED AT THE PORTRAIT DRAWINGS to illustrate the radical changes in fashion over Ingres’s long career, it is time to turn from the artist as draughtsman to the artist as colourist...

Author

Aileen Ribeiro

PublisherYale University Press

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-23132

Painted Ladies

Having looked at the portrait drawings to illustrate the radical changes in fashion over Ingres’s long career, it is time to turn from the artist as draughtsman to the artist as colourist, and in particular to the painted portraits, which describe in a far more sustained and concentrated way the individual woman and her appearance.

As a logical extension to a discussion of Ingres’s drawings, many of which in his early years depict ‘women in white’, the first chapter of this part looks at painted portraits of fashionable sitters in white. White and black were the two crucial colours in the female wardrobe in the nineteenth century (Maison Worth, for example, had a room devoted to just black and white textiles) and marked key moments in the lives of girls and woman. Black, however, was not seen simply as a mourning colour, but as high fashion, and under the heading ‘women in black’, Ingres’s use of black is discussed.

We have seen how Ingres’s use of colour was criticized in his work and how many critics unthinkingly followed the conventional thinking that the artist’s talents were not those of colour but of line. But Ingres in his portraits of ‘women of the world’ reacted instinctively and with sensual appreciation to the wide range of colours and fabrics in fashion throughout the period, from First Empire to Second Empire.

Finally, as Ingres was an artist with a remarkable sensitivity to the ways in which the female appearance was enhanced by accessories, which were not only luxury objects in their own right but also contributed to pose and gesture in portraiture, the last chapter briefly regards the ‘still lives’ of such items as gloves, shawls, fans and jewellery which played their part in the fashionable female existence.

Book details

BOOKIngres in Fashion: Representations of Dress and Appearance in Ingres’s Images of Women

Aileen Ribeiro

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-23123

For more than half of the nineteenth century, French artist Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780–1867) depicted the rapidly changing appearance of the fashionable woman with meticulous attention to detail and with rare perception and empathy. Working in a period that witnessed the development of a consumer society and the beginnings of couture, Ingres charted in his portraits how clothes were worn and what part they played in definitions of identity and status. This book explores for the first time the ways in which clothing, accessories, and fabrics define and display women in Ingres’s portraits. With more than 150 illustrations that include the artist’s portraits, fashion plates, portraits by contemporaries, and surviving items of costume, the book illuminates Ingres’s work and its relation to the social and artistic discourse of his time.

Eminent dress historian Aileen Ribeiro analyzes in detail Ingres’s attitudes, his skill in depicting clothing, and how he portrays the real and idealized woman in his paintings and drawings of the fashionable mainstream—the grandes dames of elite society, the newly opulent bourgeoisie, English visitors to Italy, and family and friends. Ribeiro also devotes a section of the book to the part played by textiles and accessories in Ingres’s images of bathers and odalisques.

Some editorial changes have been made by the author to this electronic version.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal.*

Author

Aileen Ribeiro

PublisherYale University Press

Print publication date March 1999 (out of print)

Print ISBN 9780300079272

EISBN 9780300272369

Illustrations 173

Print Status out of print

Publisher (out of print)

WorldCat

Google Books

Base text size -

Chapter images ()