Art History ISSN 0141-6790 Vol. 23 No. 5 December 2000 pp.

706±725

Ingres in Reproduction

Stephen Bann

One of the most pervasive historiographic myths about the nineteenth century is
the one encapsulated in Walter Benjamin's essay of 1936 `The work of art in the
age of mechanical reproduction'. It runs parallel, in the visual sphere, to that other
grand narrative of the progress of realism produced in the dark days towards the
end of the half-century, Erich Auerbach's Mimesis, whose historiographical form
has recently engaged Hayden White. Both are concerned with the figure of history
as fulfilment, with the achieved realism of the nineteenth century as a prelude to
the final coincidence between the possibilities of the medium and the
opportunities of the historical present in the age of modernism.1
Benjamin's well-known thesis does not, however, extend over the millennia
like that of Auerbach: it works like a concertina in compressing the shift that takes
place over the first half of the nineteenth century from a pluralistic range of
techniques of pictorial reproduction to a hegemonic system dominated by the
photograph. Indeed photography becomes in this process not only the ultimate
test of visual realism, but also the agent of a distinctively new economy of the
`original' and the `copy'. Benjamin is entirely aware that the nineteenth century
saw other, earlier innovations in the sphere of reproduction. He alludes
specifically to lithography, of which he appears to have been something of a
connoisseur. But the role of lithography in his essay is limited to that of a John the
Baptist. Benjamin writes: `But only a few decades after its invention, lithography
was surpassed [uÈberfluÈgelt] by photography.'2
Focusing as he does on the `direct' nature of the lithographic process, Benjamin
also harnesses it to the task of representing `everyday life' for the mass public.
`Lithography enabled graphic art to illustrate everyday life, and it began to keep pace
with printing.'3 In this way, a proto-impressionist seed is implanted right from the
start. Benjamin conveniently forgets that, for virtually the whole century, the
predominant modes for the diffusion of popular imagery were the wood-block and
the steel engraving. It was these techniques that enabled the new `magazines' to
introduce their readers to exotic locations, historical buildings and the principles of
popular science. When Daguerre died in 1851, the Illustrated London News did him
the honour of a portrait taken from a daguerreotype by Claudet. But it was a wood-
block engraving that was called upon to mediate the photographic image.4
It goes without saying that, for the academic artists of the first half of the
century, this proleptic vision of the photograph carrying all before it was

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 INGRES IN REPRODUCTION

completely inaccessible. Reproduction in multiple form was certainly a pressing

concern for the French painters of this period. The arrival of lithography in Paris
in 1816, when both Charles de Lasteyrie and Engelmann opened for business, was
a major preoccupation for the AcadeÂmie des Beaux-Arts. Indeed a commission
was appointed to look into the possibilities of the new planographic medium, and
artists like Gros, GueÂrin and the Vernets, father and son, hastened to try their
hands.5 But it is a very doubtful whether lithography fully established itself as a
medium for reproduction (let alone whether photography `surpassed' lithography)
in academic circles. On the contrary, it appears that the arrival of both media
helped to set off an intense debate about the aesthetic adequacy of planographic
reproduction, which was settled, for Ingres and most of his peers, with a
resounding vote in favour of traditional, intaglio print-making.
In fact, one of the painters most immediately sympathetic to the cause of
photography ± Horace Vernet, who left France for the Eastern Mediterranean in
the autumn of 1839 with daguerreotype equipment in his baggage ± is also the
writer in the same year of the pamphlet Du Droit des peintres et des sculpteurs sur
leurs ouvrages. Here the traditional engraving receives the following emphatic
endorsement:

Engraving is the means of propagating and giving eternity to the painter's

work. Is it not engraving, in fact, that is for the most part of the time the
most active agent in the painter's reputation? . . . Engraving is, so to speak,
to the picture, what printing is to the manuscript: it is the thing that
multiplies it, it is the thing that propagates and popularizes it; it is the
thing that gives eternity to the work; it is the thing that immortalizes the
genius of the painter.6

There can be little doubt that Ingres shared the view of the engraver's role
expressed so emphatically by Vernet on behalf of his academy colleagues.7 Had he
not reached mid-career with two of his most important works, the Voeu de Louis
XIII (Salon of 1824; see plate 30, page 713) and Saint Symphorien (Salon of 1834),
tucked away in remote cathedrals in provincial France, relatively inaccessible to
him as well as to the young artists of his circle? One has only to see, in the attic
reserve of the MuseÂe Ingres at Montauban, the series of twelve engravings in `large
gold frames' (dubbed the `twelve apostles' by Georges Vigne) to realize how
unique and irreplaceable a service to a painter's reputation was provided by these
intensively worked multiple images.8
I hasten to add that this exceptional set of prints after Ingres's most celebrated
works was not put together by the artist. It was the city's gesture to its most
famous son to gather together the prints presented to them by Ingres with those
that they had purchased;9 one of the group, the Saint Symphorien engraved by
Alphonse FrancËois, was indeed only completed and added to the collection after
his death, in 1872. But it will be the argument of this paper that Ingres was
constantly preoccupied with securing the type of assurance of his reputation that
only reproductive engraving could give. To be preoccupied with achieving the best
possible methods of reproduction was not, of course, just an indication of an
artist's commitment to securing a widespread and durable reputation; it also had

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direct financial implications ± as Vernet's pamphlet on reproduction rights makes

very clear.10 I will argue, however, that the very mixture of motives that is
discernible in Ingres's experience with print-making, and his constitutional
uncertainty about committing himself to particular artists, illuminate the special
role that he played among his peers and contemporaries.
In particular, it is worth making the comparison, from the start, with Paul
Delaroche, the son-in-law of Horace Vernet and one of the two members of the
painting section deputed to serve on the commission that approved his report in
1839. In this respect, as in so many others, Delaroche presents an instructive
contrast to Ingres. Delaroche can stand as the prime example of a painter of the
period who not only set great store by the engraving of his works, but also achieved
the optimum production and distribution of them through his close connection to
the Maison Goupil. In Delaroche's case, it was Goupil who provided the major
part of the enormous investment necessary to engage the services of a leading
engraver over many years. Although Ingres published with Goupil the version of
Henri IV et ses enfants engraved by Richomme in 1835, he did not establish a
similar working relationship with an editor, and was obliged to find other ways of
financing his reproductions. He did however have an immense stroke of good
fortune in meeting one of the foremost engravers of the period, Luigi Calamatta, at
the time of the young artist's first arrival in Paris in 1825, and collaborated with
him on several editions: notably the Voeu de Louis XIII (see plate 30, page 713),
begun around 1825 and published in 1837, and the duc d'OrleÂans (see plate 28, page
711), begun in 1842 and completed in almost record time for Calamatta within a
mere three years.
The sheer time, as well as money, expended on a burin engraving11 ± together
with the prestigious past of the technique and its claim to be a translation rather than
a mere record of the original ± put it at the other extreme from the photographic
image in every respect. It is, nevertheless, in the very period of the incubation and
hatching of the process pioneered by NieÂpce and Daguerre ± broadly between 1825
and 1860 ± that the reproductive engraving sees its most prolific late flowering, and
receives its most intense critical scrutiny from writers of the calibre of Charles Blanc
and Henri Delaborde. I shall be addressing in particular Ingres's involvement with
this process. But initially it is necessary to look at the other end of the scale, at
photography's planographic precursor: the lithograph. Ingres's involvement with
lithography is hard to determine and evaluate, but this very difficulty can be seen as
part and parcel of the ambiguous status of the process, at least in its initial period,
with respect to the proprieties of authorship.
Here I should acknowledge the existence of a long-running dispute that cannot
be resolved in a short article. It is generally agreed that Ingres completed an etched
portrait of Gabriel Courtois de Pressigny, French Ambassador in Rome, in 1816,
and that this was reproduced lithographically in 1820. Beraldi also includes in his
catalogue two lithographic portraits of English travellers in Rome signed `Ingres,
Rome 1815', but it appears that the proofs are on English paper, and therefore
highly unlikely to have been pulled by Ingres himself.12 A different kind of
controversy rages around the Odalisque, inscribed `Ingres 1825' in the lower right-
hand corner and published by the Parisian lithographer Delpech. It has been noted
that the composition derives from a variant of the Louvre Odalisque (1814),

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26 Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Odalisque, 1825. Lithograph after variant of La Grande

Odalisque, 1814. MuseÂe Ingres, Montauban. Photo: Roumagnac.

possibly the near-replica now in the MuseÂe des Beaux-Arts at Angers (Rizzoli 82c),
which also replaces the prominent peacock's feather with a more modest fly-
whisk. But it is not identical to the latter work, and in fact none of the known
painted versions incorporates the smoking brazier ± if that is how it should be
described ± on the left-hand side (plate 26). It seems fair to assume that no one but
Ingres himself would have taken this liberty in the process of reproduction, and
that the smoke effect was indeed precisely devised to suit the possibilities of the
lithographic process. Paint could not easily manage the hazy cloud achieved with
the lithographic crayon. This point, together with the altogether exceptional
quality of the drawing compared with other contemporary lithographs, leads to
the conclusion that it is probably by Ingres.
An additional, possibly significant piece of evidence has come up recently.
This is the appearance in a catalogue of the same lithograph transferred to chine,
with a facsimile of Ingres's signature and the address of the lithographic editor:
Joseph Lemercier.13 This reappearance of the print with one of the foremost
editors of the period (who, however, only started his business in the 1830s)
suggests Ingres's continued interest in the image. On the other hand, it is quite
probable that the original editor's name was conventionally used to identify this
lithograph, and Ingres's direct involvement in the printing process would not have
been regarded as worthy of special note. Most likely this is the work signalled in
the catalogue of the 1831 Salon, under the composite entry of Delpech, which
reads: `Lithographies, d'apreÁs MM. Ingres, Lawrence et Mme Lebrun'.14

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27 Jean-Pierre Sudre, lithograph, 1833, after Ingres, La Chapelle Sixtine,

1814. MuseÂe Ingres, Montauban. Photo: Roumagnac.

Ingres's own lithographic sorties, if such they were, did not prevent him from
collaborating with a compatriot from the southwest of France, Jean-Pierre Sudre,
who became (in Beraldi's words) his `translator by appointment (traducteur
attitreÂ)' in the medium of lithography.15 Sudre began his long service to Ingres
with an Odalisque in 1826, and in 1833 completed what was often seen as his
masterpiece in the medium with a version of La Chapelle Sixtine (plate 27;
completed in 1814 to a commission from Marcotte, now in the National Gallery
of Art, Washington DC). Curiously, the lithograph reduces down the image
slightly, at top and bottom, and at both sides. Its overall dimensions, however, are
closely comparable (78.9  91.5 cm as opposed to 74  92 cm for the painting,
which allows for the extra space around the lithographic image).
Beraldi's specific comment on this work is significant. He notes `without being
irreverent . . . the analogy between the effect of lighting by light from above' in
Sudre's lithograph and in Daumier's famous political satire of the Chamber of
Deputies, Le Ventre leÂgislatif.16 The comment betrays both the inevitable
association of the medium with popular political caricature, from the early
1830s onwards, and, no doubt, the relatively restricted critical discourse available
for the evaluation of lithography. Such `effects' of light put the lithograph in the
company of the new, popular forms of pictorial spectacle like the diorama and the
panorama, rather than with Salon painting and its privileged medium of
translation: the burin engraving.
Ingres would certainly have recognized this point. He was willing, indeed
anxious, to give the appropriate commitment and investment to seeing his major
works engraved: hence his close personal and professional association with
Calamatta. This is not to say that Calamatta was debarred from also undertaking
relatively short-term reproductive prints after Ingres's drawings, using the `crayon

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28 Luigi Calamatta, engraving,

1845, after Ingres, Portrait du duc
d'Orleans, 1842. MuseÂe Ingres,
Montauban. Photo: Roumagnac.

manner' derived from English engravers, such as the Paganini which was on
display at the 1831 Salon, the self-portrait (1835) that Ingres dedicated to his
students, and the posthumous portrait of the young Henri, Duc d'OrleÂans, which
was completed in 1842 ± the very year of the young prince's untimely death. In all
these cases, there appears to have been a strictly practical motive in creating the
work. This is most obvious in the case of the duc d'OrleÂans. We still have Ingres's
letter to Calamatta regretting bitterly that he could not yet capitalize on the
demand for a full-scale burin engraving of his portrait of the young man,
fortuitously completed just before his untimely death. His broad hint about the
financial opportunity missed must have encouraged Calamatta to venture this
interim solution.17 The burin engraving in fact had to wait for its completion until
1845 ± a gap of merely three years, which was a remarkably short time for the
technique (plate 28).
The print of Ingres's self-portrait had a more benevolent aim, because in 1835
Ingres took up the post of Director of the French Academy at Rome, and renewed
his acquaintance with many of his old students. It is, however, in the first, and
most famous, of the three crayon-manner engravings that Ingres's close
collaboration with Calamatta is most clearly revealed. Ingres first met the great
violinist Paganini in Rome, possibly in April 1819, and 1819 is the date carried by
his original signed drawing, now in the Louvre. In the early 1830s Paganini was
attracting attention in Paris, with his virtuoso recitals, and it seems reasonable to

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29 Luigi Calamatta, crayon-

manner engraving, 1830, after
Ingres's drawing of Paganini
1818/19. MuseÂe Ingres,
Montauban. Photo: Roumagnac.

conclude that Ingres enlisted Calamatta to put on sale a print of this passing
celebrity (plate 29). However, the Calamatta engraving bears the date 1818, and is
discrepant in some important details from the Louvre drawing. On the other
hand, it is very similar to a further drawing, on tracing paper, which is now in the
collection of the Metropolitan Museum, New York. The hypothesis has been
made that there was a second early drawing, dated 1818, from which both the
drawing on tracing paper and the print derive. More plausible, however, is the
hypothesis that Ingres adapted (and incidentally misdated) his 1819 drawing to
serve as a basis for Calamatta's work.18
The circumstances under which Ingres first met Calamatta, and shortly
afterwards entrusted to him the engraving of the Voeu de Louis XIII (completed for
the 1824 Salon), are detailed in a remarkable, unpublished autobiographical
sketch by the latter. Clearly, Ingres was determined to have an engraving of this
large commissioned painting which had cost him so much labour, and which had
brought him unprecedented critical acclaim. According to Calamatta, he had been
expecting Louis Desnoyers, one of the four engraver academicians, who was,
moreover, celebrated for his prints after Raphael, to offer his services. Instead, the
unknown young Italian, who had been enticed into moving from his native Rome

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30 Luigi Calamatta, engraving,

1837 after Ingres, Le Voeu de
Louis XIII, 1824. MuseÂe Ingres,
Montauban. Photo: Roumagnac.

to Paris by Ingres's friend, the Prix de Rome engraver Taurel, took advantage of
the fact that Ingres was lodging in Taurel's house to beg for the privilege.
Calamatta's account wonderfully conveys Ingres's extreme scepticism at the
pretensions of this untried artist, followed by his equally extreme astonishment
when Calamatta finally presented him with a drawing which showed a part of the
painting in sufficient detail to indicate his potential as an engraver. Calamatta had
taken three months to complete the drawing, and he would take until 1837 to
complete the final engraving (plate 30).19 The financial aid of Ingres's friend
Marcotte had had to be enlisted to finance this long and costly enterprise. But
when it did finally appear thirteen years after the Salon, Ingres was overjoyed at
this timely revival of interest in the work which had spent the intervening period
immured in the neoclassical cathedral of Montauban. He wrote to Calamatta
from Rome in September 1837 to congratulate him on the LeÂgion d'honneur that
he had received for his achievement. Ingres himself had received the same
decoration after the success of the original painting in 1825.20
Ingres uses a significant phrase while congratulating Calamatta: `j'ai l'honneur
et le bonheur d'eÃtre si glorieusement traduit.' (I am happy and glad to be so

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31 Charles-Simon Pradier,
engraving, 1832, after variant of
Ingres, Tu Marcellus Eris (Virgil
Reading the Aeneid), 1812. MuseÂe
Ingres, Montauban. Photo:
Roumagnac.

gloriously translated).21 What delighted and flattered him was the idea that such
an acclaimed burin engraving was by tradition both a demonstration of the
engraver's accomplishment, and an act of homage to the work selected. In a true
sense, it both confirmed the status of the masterpiece and relaunched it into the
world. Well on towards the end of the century, this distinctive element of added
value was still taken for granted, at least amongst the engraving community.
LeÂopold Flameng, a noted pupil of Calamatta who took on the works of Frith as
well as those of Ingres, confirmed, however, that reproductive engraving was a
dying art, and Calamatta perhaps its last representative. As he noted in a letter to
Beraldi: `Calamatta took with him the noble formulas of our art, the high style.
He was the last engraver to be capable of attacking the greatest masters, Raphael,
Ingres.'22
As the 1837 letter makes plain, Ingres would have preferred to have all his
major works engraved, and preferably by Calamatta. Yet the time-consuming
nature of the process, and Ingres's evident reluctance to commit himself to a single
editor like Goupil, made this virtually impossible. Even the devoted Calamatta
complained of his constant interference in the lengthy process of preparing the
plate. Ingres would take successive proof stages as an excuse for continuing to
work on his compositions, modifying them in successive drawings and contriving
to insert these modifications into the finished print. In the case of the version of
Tu Marcellus Eris, which was engraved by Charles-Simon Pradier in 1832, Ingres
seems to have worked as an assiduous but tiresome collaborator, modifying the

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32 Early state of plate 31, with

pencil additions. MuseÂe Ingres,
Montauban. Photo: Roumagnac.

composition `each day' (according to Beraldi) through the use of transfers based
on the existing proofs, and then expecting Pradier to adjust accordingly.23 It is fair
to point out that, in all probability, Ingres was trying to re-create a work that had
been cut down in size shortly after it was painted, and was in any case at the time
inaccessible to him. But the consequence was that the engraver had to participate
in a work of laborious synthesis, rather than `translation'. When the 1812 version
later came back into his hands, Ingres adjusted it in some respects to accord with
the innovations carried out in the print, which, because of its taller format, still
remains the most complete version of the composition.24 A proof of the print in
the collection of the MuseÂe Ingres shows pencil lines indicating the new position
of the Emperor's hand, matched against the Brussels painting (c. 1819) and a
subsequent drawing dating from 1825 (plates 31 and 32; see also plate 10, page
669).
Such a procedure was indeed both practically and theoretically at variance
with the principle of `translation'. Yet Ingres quite consistently showed himself to
be incapable of treating his own earlier works as over and done with. This
ultimately resulted in the curious anomaly of the Magimel collection, Oeuvres de
J.A. Ingres, graveÂes au trait sur acier (1851), which was, in principle, a kind of
catalogue raisonne employing the quasi-automatic transcription system of the
pantographe-gavard for its illustrations, but in practice a record of works several
of which had never existed in that particular form. Ingres could not resist taking
the opportunity to extend certain of his works, both modifying their format and
adding details that had not been there before.25 In one sense a significant precursor

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33 LeÂopold Flameng, engraving,

1867, after Ingres, Madame
DevaucËay, 1807.

of the two great photographic catalogues raisonneÂs for the works of Paul
Delaroche and Ary Scheffer edited by Goupil by the end of the decade, the
Magimel collection is in another sense an abiding testimony to Ingres's extreme
unease with the concept of definitive reproduction.
In so far as the development of photography permitted (and achieved in these
two catalogues) a definitive historicization of these artists' works, it necessarily
fixed their forms in a chronologically ordered sequence that was not open to
further variation. For Ingres, this would certainly have been anathema. He valued
the freedom to select an engraver of recognized status in the profession, who
would `translate' his works. This provided him, at one and the same time, with a
means of activating informed response in the present, and an opportunity to
become part of the tradition of great painters of the past who had been interpreted
by almost equally prestigious engravers ± Raphael and Raimondi being the prime
paired examples.
Yet even if Calamatta had been willing to devote his life's work entirely to
Ingres, he would not have had time to complete all the necessary engravings. And
Ingres himself did not keep a firm grasp on his priorities. The Apotheosis of
Homer (see plate 41, page 729), for example, which Ingres cites temptingly in the
previously quoted letter of 1837, was not to be engraved by Calamatta ± or indeed
by anyone else. Ingres insisted on a massive reworking and expansion of the
composition, and this was completed only by 1865, when neither Calamatta nor

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he himself could take it further, though there is a large photographic print of its
penultimate state by Charles Marville.26 Saint-Symphorien, as has been already
mentioned, had to wait to be engraved until after Ingres's death. Antiochus et
Stratonice (see plate 37), for which he explicitly reserved the rights of
reproduction when he delivered the finished work to the Duc d'OrleÂans in
1841, was entrusted to a pupil of Richomme named Florence Pollet, but never
completed.27 Only after Ingres's death, did Flameng finally get permission from
his widow to make an engraving for the SocieÂte francËaise de gravure. Conscious,
no doubt, of his obligations as a pupil of Calamatta, Flameng had been publishing
a succession of fine engravings after Ingres in Charles Blanc's Gazette des Beaux-
Arts from 1859 onwards, marking the painter's death in 1867 with an exquisite
rendering of the early Portrait of Madame DevaucËay (1807; plate 33).28
Ingres was fortunate in retaining the interest of the dwindling band of burin
engravers. Among the artists enjoying the patronage of the Gazette, only
Meissonier draws equal with him, among modern artists, in the number of works
after him that are engraved between 1859 and 1906 (and of all artists, only
Rembrandt draws ahead of these two front-runners). As far as his lifetime is
concerned, however, some indication of the problems that Ingres had to face ± and
to a certain extent created for himself ± can be found in an interesting unpublished
letter which he sent to one of the few other French engravers of Calamatta's
stature in December 1840. Louis Henriquel-Dupont, already well known for his
engravings after Delaroche, had evidently asked Ingres if he could engrave one of
the Odalisque paintings, and publish it with Goupil. Ingres replied with exquisite,
if contorted politeness that he had already offered it to Calamatta, but would have
preferred to give it to Henriquel because he believed it to be `particularly adapted
to the type of expression of your talent'.29 In fact, Calamatta never did engrave an
Odalisque. But Henriquel, perhaps as a direct result of this initial approach, was
to publish his engraving of Monsieur Bertin in 1844. Henriquel was a pupil of the
most renowned engraver of the Empire, Bervic, who was in his turn the pupil of
the most admired engraver of the previous generation, Wille (the friend of
Diderot). In entrusting this portrait to this celebrated engraver, who would be
elected to the Academy in 1839, Ingres was adding his own name and his own
painting to a sequence of canonical engravings that dated back beyond his master
David into the previous century.
Ingres thus took advantage, whatever his inhibitions, of the last great age of
the burin engraving, and was posthumously honoured by the fine printmakers of
the next generation. By the 1860s, however, when Flameng was working for the
new connoisseurs of the SocieÂte francËaise de gravure and the Gazette des Beaux-
Arts, the engravers were having to meet the challenge of the photographers, now
sufficiently assured in their techniques to enter the market for fine reproductions.
If we compare Flameng's engraving of Ingres's Angelica (1859, plate 34) with the
albumen print of the same painting by Paul Berthier, published by Ingres's dealer
Haro at around the same time, it is possible to list minutely the respects in which
the two reproductions differ. Flameng, of course, transposes the painterly effect of
the oils into the refined and varied textures produced by incised line on chine,
whilst Berthier's photo-sensitive medium renders the varying incidence of light
and dark across the glossy surface of the coated paper (plate 35).30 The significant

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34 Leopold Flameng, engraving, 1859, after Ingres, Roger Freeing

Angelica, 1859, as reproduced in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 1 January
1863. Photo: Ashmolean Museum Libarary, Oxford.

point, however, is that they are of the same size, and strictly comparable in their
finesse as reproductions. At this stage, they would also have been quite closely
comparable in price.
Ingres's middle years, however, coincided with the earlier stages of the
development of photographic techniques, and it is instructive to conclude this
article with an account, however brief, of his intermittent engagement with the
new medium. In 1839 Delaroche had responded to Arago's request for an artist's
view of the daguerreotype with a strictly instrumental definition of its potential
uses.31 His colleague Ingres was quick (quicker, indeed, than Delaroche himself) to
harness the photographic image for the purposes of documentation. As early as
1842, he announced to his friend Gilibert that he was having `daguerreotypes
taken' and varnishing done to a work before showing it in public.32 None of these
has survived, but there is a stray daguerreotype by DeÂsire Millet in the collections

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35 Paul Berthier, albumen print, c. 1863, after Ingres, Roger Freeing

Angelica, 1859.

of the MuseÂe Ingres which shows a view of the studio, with a female nude in the
foreground and the standing version of Madame Moitessier (see plate 12, page
684) visible in the background. From internal evidence, it has been suggested that
this dates from 1852, and that Ingres may have been anxious to retain an image of
the former work ± for which his first wife had modelled ± when he married for the
second time in that year.
From the 1850s onwards, there is accumulating evidence that photographers
visited Ingres's studio, and made records that could also be considered acceptable
reproductions, as the photographic techniques involving paper prints from the
collodion process were being developed. It has been argued, that Charles
Marville's photograph of the Self-Portrait (1804) probably dates from around
1851, as it shows the work in a state which was significantly altered before the end
of that year.33 Another photograph by Marville, possibly of the Homer and his

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Guide (Royal Collection, Brussels) completed in 1862, is recorded as having been

given by Ingres to his friend Charles StuÈrmer in the 1850s.34 Whatever the precise
date of this print, it is clear that Marville `systematically' photographed Ingres's
drawings in the early 1860s and exhibited them with the SocieÂte francËaise de
photographie in 1865, before offering them for sale in 1867 after the painter's
death.35
Marville was a photographer of established reputation by the early 1860s, but
he was by no means specialized in the photographic reproduction of paintings.
Among the international medallists rewarded at the London International
Exhibition of 1862, Marville is cited for his `eÂpreuves photographiques d'objets
antiques, paysages etc.' (and Paul Berthier receives an honourable mention for his
`reproduction excellente d'objets d'art'). But the only medallist cited for `la
reproduction excellente des peintures et autres objets d'art' is Robert Bingham.36
Since Bingham was universally credited with having brought reproduction
photography to a state of previously unparalleled excellence, it is worth noting his
not entirely satisfactory contacts with Ingres.
English-born Bingham had a substantial expertise in photographic techniques
when he established himself in Paris in the early 1850s, and set up a studio in the
rue de la Rochefoucauld, which endured under his name until around 1870.37 He
was the first practitioner of photography to achieve a suitable method for copying
paintings and prints by the collodion wet-plate process, and he provided the
extensive photographic survey for the massive Delaroche catalogue published by
Goupil in 1858 and its successor, devoted to Ary Scheffer, in 1859. Bingham did
publish at least one photograph after Ingres, an Odalisque edited by Goupil as
no. 6 in their Galerie photographique in October 1858.38 However, it is unlikely
that this assignment involved direct contact with Ingres himself. The work had
attracted renewed attention when shown in the Paris Exposition universelle of
1855, and by 1858 was part of Goupil's own collection.
Goupil's Galerie photographique represented an important new stage in the
marketing of photographic reproductions of works of art. Ingres's Odalisque was
priced at 8 francs for the print on chine, mounted on Bristol board, and with
engraved titles. This was incidentally cheaper than any of the three Delaroche
photographs, which included Marie-Antoinette and HeÂrodiade at 12 francs, and a
panoramic view of the HeÂmicycle des Beaux-Arts at 30 francs. But this could be
accounted for simply by differences in overall scale.39 These prices may be
compared with those of the `lithographies aÁ deux crayons' after Courbet and
Greuze, quoted in the same price list at 5 francs for the basic print, and up to 15
francs for the various hand-coloured versions. For the first time, perhaps,
reproduction photography had become currently available in an edition which
enabled comparison with the other competing techniques to be drawn.
As stated before, there is no reason to suppose that Ingres was involved in the
making of this photograph. However, he may well have been impressed by
Bingham's evident mastery of the tonal register of the medium,40 and invited him
to try his talents on works which were currently in the studio. This is possibly
how he became the author of the print (plate 36) of Antiochus et Stratonice
(version dated 1860, now on loan to the Philadelphia Museum of Art; plate 37)
which still exists in the Ingres archive at Montauban. But in this case, the

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36 Robert J. Bingham, albumen print, c. 1860, after Ingres, Antiochus et

Stratonice, 1860. MuseÂe Ingres, Montauban. Photo: Roumagnac.

37 Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Antiochus et Stratonice, 1860. Philadelphia

Museum of Art. Anonymous loan.

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considerably heightened colour range of Ingres's neoclassical manner has proved a

real stumbling block. One has only to look at the bizarre transformations of
relative colour values in the photographic print ± a result of the limited spectral
sensitivity of the plates at that time ± to realize that Ingres must have been
horrified at the image. It traduced, rather than translating, the sophisticated
classicizing interior. It is unlikely that Bingham would have received any
encouragement to take the experiment further. Although the name and address of
Bingham's studio are given on the mount, there is no sign of his customary red
monogram or of his blindstamp. Nor does the photograph appear to have been
editioned and exhibited. A comparison with a present-day black-and-white
photograph of the painting indicates the discrepancies, most notably in the change
in figure±ground relationships throughout Ingres's carefully detailed decorative
scheme (plates 36 and 37).
In conclusion, it is possible to say that, if the wish-fulfilling machine of Western
culture was powering ahead in the mid-century, fuelled by the photographic
process, it conspicuously failed to correspond to the desires and ambitions of
Ingres. Attracted by lithography, to a certain extent, but mainly seduced by the
unequalled prestige of the burin engraving, he was rarely inattentive to the need to
foster projects of reproduction after his most valued works. But a host of
difficulties intervened ± ranging from his reluctance to tie himself commercially to
an editor, and his arm's-length relationship with virtually all potential engravers
excepting Calamatta, to the objective factors which prevented such projects being
completed in anything short of a lengthy period of years. The Benjaminian vision
of the arrival of photography, however seductive, fails to do justice to the
existential complexity of the field within which early nineteenth-century academic
artists were obliged to make their bids for `eternity'. The Foucauldian picture
which has succeeded it ± in so far as it displaces attention from photography's
`invention' to `the desire for photography'± fails to register the lines of fault within
a discursive system which still comprised highly traditional as well as novel modes
of reproduction. As Joel Snyder has remarked, in his review of Geoffrey Batchen's
Burning with Desire: `We have read this story before. It is the details that will make
it compelling.'41 The virtual absence of any serious study of reproductive engraving
in the current historiography of French nineteenth-century painting does indeed
leave us with many such details to be filled in.

Stephen Bann
University of Bristol

Notes
1 See Walter Benjamin, `The Work of Art in the Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins
Age of Mechanical Reproduction', in University Press, 1999, pp. 87±100. White writes:
Illuminations, trans. by Harry Zohn, London: `But it seems to me that Auerbach interprets
Fontana, 1992. For Hayden White's analysis of modernism as a further development of
Auerbach's Mimesis in terms of `progressive nineteenth-century realism, hence as a fulfilment
fulfilment', see `Auerbach's literary history: [sic] of nineteenth-century realism's identification
Figural Causation and Modernist Historicism', of reality with history . . . What appears to be
in Figural Realism: Studies in the Mimesis Effect, a rejection of history is a further elaboration of

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its nineteenth-century form, which now appears been the proposal of the Chambre des Paris to
as a figure beginning to be fulfilled in the mid- bring in a new copyright law which transferred
twentieth century.'(p. 99). Although the terms of the right to reproduce a painting from the artist
the argument are necessarily different, I suggest to the owner (see Vernet, Du Droit, op. cit. [note
that Benjamin's position is analogous in its view 6], p. 6). The assertion of the crucial importance
of photography as both the rejection and of reproductive engraving is thus inseparable
fulfilment of visual realism. from the artist's wish to control and benefit
2 Benjamin, Illuminations, p. 213. financially from the rights of reproduction.
3 ibid. 11 The burin engraving, or gravure aÁ l'eau douce, is
4 See `The Late M. Daguerre ± From a so called from the sharp tool used to make the
Daguerrotype by Claudet', Illustrated London incisions on the copper plate. Throughout the
News, 26 July 1851. Among the pioneers of the period under discussion, it remains the most
illustrated magazine were the two French titles, prestigious as well as the most labour-intensive
Magasin pittoresque and Magasin universel, mode of reproductive engraving, though it is
started around 1834. challenged even in France by the so-called
5 By `planographic' is meant a print which is taken manieÁre noire, an equivalent to the English
from a flat surface, as opposed to the traditional mezzotint which employs a special rocking tool
`intaglio' method where the image is produced to achieve a dark and velvety texture, and by the
from an incised plate. In this respect, lithography etching or gravure aÁ l'eau forte, which achieves
could be said to resemble its successor, its incisions through the use of acid.
photography. For further discussion of the 12 See Ingres ± L'oeuvre graveÂ, op. cit. (note 8),
reaction of leading French painters to p. 12.
lithography, see my forthcoming study, Parallel 13 See Estampes modernes Henri M. Petiet ±
Lines: Printmakers, painters and photographers CommeÂmoration du bicentenaire de la
in nineteenth-century France, Yale University Lithographie, Paris: Picard Audap Solanet, 16
Press. December 1999, item 9.
6 Horace Vernet, Du Droit des peintres et des 14 Although the entry does not specify titles, it is
sculpteurs sur leurs ouvrages, Paris: Edouard hard to see which work(s) by Ingres could have
Proux, 1841, p. 37; my translation. been covered by the general entry, apart from the
7 After Vernet's piece had been written in the 1825 lithograph of the Odalisque. Ingres's other
summer of 1839, a commission of the AcadeÂmie lithograph of 1825, Les quatre magistrats de
des Beaux-Arts was appointed to report on it, BesancËon, commissioned for a publication by
which included two members from the different Baron Taylor, was edited by Engelmann.
sections: Painting, Architecture, Sculpture and Alphonse Sudre had completed another, more
Engraving. As a result of their report, the accurate reproductive lithograph of the Grande
document was approved unanimously on 12 Odalisque (1814) in 1827, but this outstanding
October 1839, and sent to the Minister of lithographer, whose further collaboration with
Instruction publique (ibid., pp. 29±30). Ingres Ingres will be noted below, was entered in his
would have been unable to participate directly in own right in the 1831 Salon catalogue, and so his
the debate as he was in Rome at the time. work cannot be implied to belong in the Delpech
8 Here, as elsewhere in Ingres studies, it is entry. See Explication des ouvrages de peinture,
necessary to acknowledge the uniquely creative sculpture, gravure, lithographie et architecture
role of Georges Vigne. The only recent exhibition des artistes vivans exposeÂs au MuseÂe royal le 1er
of lithographs and engravings after Ingres was Mai 1831, Paris: Vinchon, 1831, pp. 201, 215.
arranged by him in 1991. See Ingres ± L'oeuvre 15 See Henri Beraldi, Les Graveurs du XIXe sieÁcle,
grave dans les collections du museÂe Ingres de Nogent-le-Roi: LAME, 1981 reprint, vol. 12,
Montauban, HoÃtel Sully, MuseÂe municipal, pp. 62±3.
Chatellerault, 1991. I should also mention here 16 ibid., p. 63.
the excellent introduction, by Marjorie B. Cohn, 17 See Ingres et son influence, Actes du colloque
to Patricia Condon, In Pursuit of Perfection: The international, Montauban: Amis du MuseÂe
Art of J.-A.-D. Ingres, Indiana University Press, Ingres, 1980, p. 82, letter from Ingres to
1983, pp. 10±33. This covers many of the issues Calamatta, Paris, 1842: `ah! si la gravure pouvait
relating to Ingres's use of replicas, and seriously se faire au cour de [?], publieÂe sans les valeurs
considers his views on the various modes of marchandes c'eÂtait, j'en suis suÃr une affaire aÁ
reproduction, in a way that can only be touched avoir gagne cent mille francs.' Ingres's calculation
on here. on what the high sales of so timely a production
9 See ibid., p. 4, notes 3 and 4, for the decisions of would have brought him significantly omits the
the Conseil municipal to buy copies of prints dealer's cut.
(including the Voeu de Louis XIII) and to accept 18 The arguments around this print and the two
the gift of Henriquel-Dupont's engraving of drawings are put concisely in Hans Naef's entry
Monsieur Bertin. on the Louvre drawing in Ingres, Paris: Petit
10 The pressing motivation for Vernet's report had Palais, 1967, p. 162. The main difference between

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the Metropolitan drawing and the print is that always serve Ingres well. In the letter to
the former has a line delimiting the composition Calamatta dated 1842, already cited in note 17,
at the bottom. This however is consistent with he complains of not having a `passable drawing'
the supposition that Ingres decided to shorten the on which to base an engraving of his painting of
body, with reference to the 1819 drawing, and the Duc d'OrleÂans because of a `fault in the
had no reason to wish for this bounding line to pantographe'. See Ingres et son influence, op. cit.
be carried over into the print. Among the points (note 17), p. 83.
where the Metropolitan drawing and the print 26 See Marjorie B. Cohn, in Condon, In Pursuit of
are in accord, but the Louvre drawing not so, Perfection, op. cit. (note 8), p. 26: also note 33.
are: the `crayon' shadings to the right of the 27 According to Beraldi, he was `diverted from
violinist's left hand; the equal dark tones of the engraving' by his success as a watercolourist.
bow-strings (only the lowest of which is He did however engrave Ingres's Jeanne d'Arc
accentuated in the Louvre drawing), and the in 1845. See Beraldi, op. cit. (note 15), vol. 11,
lighter drawing of the lower part of the right pp. 19±20.
sleeve (firmly defined in the Louvre drawing). In 28 See Pierre Sanchez and Xavier Seydoux, Les
short, there is no doubt that the print derives Estampes de la Gazette des Beaux-Arts 1859±
from the Metropolitan drawing in the first 1933, Paris: L'Echelle de Jacob, 1998.
instance. It seems to me more likely that Ingres 29 See Getty Research Institute, Special Collections,
reworked his 1819 drawing to produce the 860026, letter from Ingres to Henriquel-Dupont,
Metropolitan work with its slight adjustments, postmarked 26 December 1840. The letter is
than that two such similar drawings were transcribed in my forthcoming Parallel Lines,
originally in existence bearing the dates 1818 and op. cit. (note 5).
1819. Moreover, the Metropolitan drawing has 30 Flameng's print was published in the Gazette des
been enhanced with body colour around the Beaux-Arts, 1863, 1. This version of the Angelica,
necktie ± an embellishment quite irrelevant to the supposedly derived from an early oil sketch
printmaker, but consistent with Ingres's tendency showing only the female figure in Roger Freeing
to rework and revise his compositions. Angelica (Louvre, 1819), is dated 1859. It is now
19 The autobiographical sketch by Calamatta, in the Museum of Sao Paolo, Brazil. See Condon,
which is largely concerned with his relations with In Pursuit of Perfection, op. cit. (note 8), pp.
Ingres, is in the BibliotheÁque de la ville de Paris, 94±9, for the variants relating to this composition
Fonds Sand, J 36 (Calamatta's daughter married (plate 10, p. 99). In the Gazette, this work is
George Sand's only son, Maurice Dudevant). already listed as belonging to Haro, who most
The passages summarized here are quoted in probably commissioned the photograph by
Parallel Lines, op. cit. (note 5). Berthier at the same time, with a view to selling
20 Ingres et son influence, op. cit. (note 17), p. 79, it. Paul Berthier (b. 1822) was originally a
letter from Ingres to Calamatta, dated 28 Sept. painter, exhibiting at the Salon from 1848
1837. Ingres greets Calamatta as `mon confreÁre onwards, and made a reputation in the 1860s for
en chevalerie'. his photographs. He became noted for the
21 ibid. photography of works of art being offered for
22 `Calamatta emporta avec lui les nobles formules auction, and compiled in 1861 the extraordinary
de notre art, le haut style. Il fut le dernier three-volume Objets d'art de la Collection du
graveur pouvant s'attaquer aux plus grands Prince Soltykoff (Getty Research Institute, Special
maõÃ tres, aÁ Raphael, aÁ Ingres'. Beraldi, op. cit. Collections, 92±F63).
(note 15), vol. 4, p. 53. 31 See Bann, Delaroche, pp. 264±5; also my
23 Beraldi, op. cit. (note 15), vol. 11, p. 42: `[Ingres] forthcoming Parallel Lines, op. cit. (note 5), for
se retouchait lui-meÃme pendant la gravure, a fuller treatment of Delaroche's reactions in the
apportant chaque jour quelque correction faite context of contemporary painting.
sur des calques . . .' It is in this connection that 32 Quoted in Anthony J. Hamber, `A Higher
Beraldi mentions, on the authority of Charles Branch of the Art': Photographing the Fine Arts
Blanc, Calamatta's impatience with the constant in England, 1839±1880, Amsterdam: Gordon and
changes. Breach, 1996, p. 188.
24 The different versions, including paintings and 33 See L'Opera completa di Ingres, Milan: Rizzoli,
drawings as well as Pradier's print, are assembled 1968, p. 88, for a plate of Marville's photograph,
in Condon, In Pursuit of Perfection, op. cit. together with the Self-Portrait as it exists now
(note 8), pp. 52±9. A painting in fact exists which (MuseÂe CondeÂ, Chantilly) and a replica relating
reproduces the engraving exactly (see p. 59). to the first state of the painting. The dating of
25 For a careful description of the circumstances in the Marville photograph, from the point of view
which the Magimel collection was compiled, see of technique, is complicated by the fact that the
Marjorie B. Cohn, in Condon, In Pursuit of existing print was produced by a process which
Perfection, op. cit. (note 8), p. 23. The was not available in 1851.
`pantographe-gavard' was a patent device for 34 See Hamber, `A Higher Branch of the Art', op.
the reduction of drawings. However it did not cit. (note 32), p. 188. Hamber suggests that

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Marville may have photographed the Apotheosis the same year by Frederick Scott Archer.
of Homer, then in the Galerie du Luxembourg. 38 See Publications nouvelles de la Maison Goupil
However it seems more likely that this was the et compagnie, January 1859 (Archives du MuseÂe
smaller composition, based originally on the Goupil, Bordeaux). Pierre-Lin Renie has informed
figure incorporated in the Apotheosis, which was me that this set of six prints was in fact
being reworked in Ingres's studio around 1860. published in October 1858.
For this work, see Condon, In Pursuit of 39 The dimensions of the two smaller prints by
Perfection, op. cit. (note 8), pp. 115, 198. The Delaroche are 34  22 cm, and 29  20 cm
date 1862 has been discovered by infra-red respectively, whilst those of the Odalisque are
examination and supersedes the previous dating 14  24 cm. On the other hand, this was a
of 1861. An alternative possibility is that the period in which interest in Delaroche was at its
reference is to the photograph by Marville of the height, following his death in 1856 and the
large, revised drawing of the Apotheosis (1865), subsequent retrospective exhibition in 1857 at the
mentioned in note 26. However if this is the case, Ecole des Beaux-Arts. Roger Taylor has kindly
the gift to StuÈrmer could hardly have been made provided me with details of the photographs
in the 1850s. Marville's photograph differs from which Bingham exhibited in Britain between 1851
the final drawing in a number of details, but it and 1864 and, while the prints after Delaroche
is generally believed to have been completed only are featured on many occasions, there is
`a few weeks' beforehand. See the entry by no record of the Odalisque being shown.
Daniel Ternois in Ingres catalogue, Paris: 40 This is clear from the print in the collection of
ReÂunion des museÂes nationaux, 1967, p. 206. the DeÂpartement des estampes, BibliotheÁque
35 See Hamber, 'A Higher Branch of the Art', op. nationale, Paris (EO 322a), which subtly renders
cit. (note 32), pp. 188±9. the idealized flesh tones of the original.
36 See the listing in La LumieÁre, 12th year, no. 14, 41 See Joel Snyder, review of Geoffrey Batchen,
30 July 1862, pp. 53±4. Burning with desire: The conception of
37 Bingham published in 1848 a technical manual photography, Boston: MIT Press, 1997, in Art
entitled Photogenic manipulations, whose seventh Bulletin, vol. 81, no. 3, pp. 540±2. The phrase
edition, London: George Knight, 1850, included `desire for photography' is explained in Batchen,
details of the collodion process made public in p. 36.

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