Critic's Notebook: Ingres' 'Comtesse d'Haussonville' @ Norton Simon Museum

Louise d'Haussonville arrived in Pasadena the other day, and it's always good to see her. Always strange too.

One of the greatest portraits by one of the greatest portrait painters — French genius Jean Auguste  Dominique Ingres (1780-1867), who didn't like painting portraits despite his knack for it — the picture captivates for a host of peculiar reasons. One is its color.

Colin B. Bailey, chief curator of New York's Frick Collection, which inaugurates its half of an exchange program with the Norton Simon Museum with this first-ever loan of the famous painting to California, has aptly described the picture's palette as “a rainbow of blues.”

Blue is the color of the amazing satin evening dress that first grabs attention to “Comtesse d'Haussonville” (1845), finished nearly five years after Ingres first met the doe-eyed young beauty, a young wife of 22, in Rome. The dress, with its rustling folds, intricate design and panoply of light reflections is a virtual catalog of possible blue shades.

There's more. Blue is also the color of the wall paint, the velvet mantle-cover she leans against, its fringe and a tassel, the Sèvres and other porcelains on the mantle, assorted flowers, the pouch for her fan, the bell-rope to call servants, the paisley-like pattern on the gold and red cashmere shawl draped over a chair, gemstones in her jewelry, Louise's limpid eyes, even the pale shadows beneath her eyes and along the hand she holds at her chin.

All these and more encompass the primary color's full range, starting with delicate azure and ending in deep indigo. Much of it is doubled by the reflection in the big gilded mirror behind her.

It's tempting to think of Ingre's extraordinary choice of chromatic display in symbolic rather than simply decorative terms. Nineteenth-century French painters were enamored of all things political, and Louise was from a grand political family — the great-granddaughter of Louis XVI's finance minister, the granddaughter of the brilliant essayist and salon hostess Mme. de Staël and the daughter of an eminent liberal statesman. Her husband was a diplomat, son of a distinguished soldier. “The blues,” so-called because of their uniforms, had been the troops of the revolutionary government.

Whatever the case, looking at Louise is like watching the sea's shifting colors. Lost in the reverie, you awake with a start when you notice the 4 1/3-foot-high painting's strangest feature. The countess, who is roughly life-size, rests her left elbow on her right hand, which is draped across her midriff. Yet her right arm doesn't grow from the shoulder, as physiology dictates, but from the middle of her torso.

Her sleeve-draped right arm passes behind her raised left forearm, the line continuing into the blue satin bodice that hugs her shoulder. Visually, Ingres connects Louise's right arm to her left shoulder, a physically impossible switcheroo that has the salubrious effect of heightening the sense of folding one's arms. The maneuver is echt-Ingres — a composition's artful perfection, anatomy be darned.

With Ingres' greatest portraits you find yourself seduced, then abandoned, then marveling at the painter's amazing capacities to make you believe his fictions.

This unfolding sequence of thoughts is reflected in Louise's contemplative pose, where her chin rests on a hand whose index finger extends beneath her jaw. The gesture's importance can be seen in the mirror where Ingres reflects it — even though Louise's body would have blocked it.

Critic Théophile Thoré, Ingres' contemporary, immediately recognized the pose's source in “antique statues symbolizing thought or private meditation.” The haunting young woman is wedged between the mirror-reflection behind her and the reflection happening in the viewer out front.

At the Simon, “Comtesse d'Haussonville” is accompanied by two Ingres drawings also loaned by the Frick, one a study for the not-so-simple folds in her dress. (Ingres apparently made about 80 drawings for the portrait, 15 of which are known.) There's also the Simon's own early Ingres portrait of a young baron, painted when the artist was just 25.

An added treat is the surprising copy of the Louvre Museum's 1819 Ingres, “Angelica at the Rock,” painted six decades later by an 18-year-old Georges Seurat. The worried nude, chained to a boulder, swoons. Seurat painted the copy a half-dozen years before he ventured into the very different Post-Impressionist color-dots of “Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte”; the work's stately evocation of an ancient Roman or Egyptian frieze resonates with Ingres' linear classicism.

Downstairs, Simon curator Leah Lehmbeck has assembled “Gaze: Portraiture After Ingres,” a sprawling installation of 150 paintings, sculptures, drawings, photographs and prints, opening with an 1874 Édouard Manet portrait of his wife and continuing through Marcel Duchamp's 1964 defacement of a Leonardo da Vinci reproduction of the Mona Lisa with a scribbled-pencil mustache and goatee. Gathered from the Simon's collection, plus a few loans, the show is an amiable ramble through portraiture's myriad Modern manifestations.

Still, “Comtesse d'Haussonville” is the main event. Her heirs put the great painting on the market to pay estate taxes, and the New York museum bought it for $125,000 in 1927. (That's the bargain equivalent of about $1.5 million today.) The Frick Collection can't lend anything that Henry Clay Frick himself acquired, but he died in 1919. The timing quirk has allowed “blue girl” to come to town, where she visits until Jan. 25.

-- Christopher Knight

Image: Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (French, 1780-1867), "Comtesse d'Haussonville," 1845. Credit: The Frick Collection, New York

“Ingres' Comtesse d'Haussonville,” Norton Simon Museum, 411 W. Colorado Blvd., Pasadena. Noon-6 p.m. Sat.-Mon. and Wed.- Thu., noon-9 Fri. $8. Ends Jan. 25. (626) 449-6840. www.nortonsimon.org

Comments

[Donald Frazell]

Poor CK, even when he writes a good article he messes up. Try double checking before you post. Blue was the color of the royalty, white and blue with gold flueurs-de-lis the color of royal France. Blue of the house of Valois, with the white of the Virgin Mary, symbolizing the church and god.

Blue and red were the color of Paris, but red came to mean the people, the left, and so on to communism. Blue of royalty, white of the church. The French under Napoleon wore blue and white as he had no use for the people except as followers, he is the one who tore down the French Revolution, a tyrant coming out of the mess of democracy. The King returned with his fall, but their day was over. But it was Napoleon who overthrew thrones. Taking the role of Holy Roman Emperor, without the holy, or Roman. Reliving the dream of CharleMagne, Charles the Great.

This woman was of the royal line, and so, blue. Or just maybe, thats the dress she wore, and Ingres liked it. Red is the color of England, green and white Austria, dark blue of Prussia, and Russia white. And so the French wore blues and white with red details. Dont want to shoot your buddies in the smoke and chaos of combat after all.

Ingres was not only one of the greatest draughtsmen in history, but yes, his color is incredible, just not splashy and all over like his rival Delacroix. He distained outright displays of emotion, but was truly passionate underneath that cool exterior. Just look at his works, especially his round Harem scene.

Amazing, and to think, drawing is irrelevant now. We got all these cool toys to play with, and if we use them people cant see we really have no talent. Cool, huh?

art collegia delenda est

[Christopher Knight]

This is Christopher Knight, responding to Donald Frazell. I'm afraid you're incorrect. Blue may have been a Valois color, but Louise d'Haussonville was not of that royal lineage. As for the Virgin Mary, Louise was Protestant, not Catholic. Neither were her political sympathies a secret, especially as her second book, "Robert Emmet," tells the story of an Irish revolutionary hanged for treason by the British. As she wrote in her memoirs about a political journal she kept: "One can sense in them a sympathy for the Republic, for insurrection, for the rebels, that I have had all my life..." Those are not the words of a royalist.

[Donald Frazell]

True, her portrait was done after the peaceful revolution of 1830, but before the barricades of 1848. A Bourbon was still the monarch, and Napoleons corrupt nephew took the throne as Napoleon III after his election later. But her family was dependant on royal largesse, it had simply switched to that of the new regime.

And even at this time, the meaning of the tricolor was blue for royalty, white for church, and red for the bougoisie/proletariat. They had not yet been seperated, during the Revolution, though the split had begun, to be complete by the time Louis-Phillippe became their champion.

Ingres did not deal with "liberal statemen", not of the Commune or those who would someday begin the Third Republic, but those of the aristocracy, of which she was one. Simply royalists who had switched sides, but not color.

[Charles]

Francis Bacon (the British painter, not the philosopher) called Ingres the greatest painter of female flesh ever. Interestingly, he too claimed he didn't like painting portraits, but, the same as Ingres, did a marvelous job of it.