Ingres’s Orientations

Ribeiro, Aileen

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Ingres’s Orientations

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

IN INGRES’S IMAGES OF BATHERS and odalisques, East meets West; they are clearly western women clothed...

Author

Aileen Ribeiro

PublisherYale University Press

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-23137

Ingres’s Orientations

In Ingres's images of bathers and odalisques, East meets West; they are clearly western women clothed (or, rather, barely clothed—perhaps decorated would be a more accurate word) in various kinds of European and Turkish textiles and accessories, set within an oriental context—the bath and the harem. They are women in whose bodies and surroundings Ingres marries his love of fashion, luxury and sensuality to his sense of history in the recalling of the great Renaissance nudes and to his imagining of the East.

After a few remarks on Ingres’s attitude towards the idealized female nude, this part considers the background to the portrayal of his bathers and odalisques. It is concerned with the long-established conventions of western artists depicting the Orient, and the impact made by the East—Turkey in particular—on nineteenth-century French culture, including costume and accessories. The cult of the bath and the concept of the harem—aspects of Ottoman society that fascinated the West—are discussed in the context of European perceptions of them. How Ingres interpreted these themes in his art forms the subject of chapter II. The artist, who never visited the East, conjures up—with the aid of costume books and literature (Montesquieu’s Lettres persanes and the Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, for example)—luxury furnishings and textiles—the Orient of his imagination. His bathers and odalisques are fantasies—albeit solidly corporeal—of the East, of the Renaissance nude, and of a Platonic ideal of female beauty. For some fifty years, Ingres experimented with eastern themes, often reusing his images as though endlessly fascinated by his own absorbing interest in an ‘oriental’ imaginary world.

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

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