Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres

Ingres received his first lessons in painting and music from his father, an artist, in a town in southern France, and at 12 he began to study at the academy in Toulouse. He went to Paris in 1797 and entered the studio of David, and in 1801 he won the Prix de Rome for The Ambassadors of Agamemnon. He did not reach Rome until 1806, and stayed there until 1824.

Ingres saw drawing as the means to reconcile the tension between his sensibility and his intellect. In portraits he developed an individual approach using curves, unlike David's masculine, straight-lined style, and left works such as Mademoiselle Rivière and Portrait of Monsieur Bertin. With works including the Grande Odalisque and, late in life, The Turkish Bath (1863), his standing as the Neoclassical counterpart to the Romantic Delacroix was established.