The exhibition at the National Gallery of Ingres's portraits is both lavish and comprehensive. It also insists that you come to a conclusion about him. To be offered something as complete as this and not sort out your ideas would be slovenly. Which is not to say that it's easy. The pictures are brilliantly painted, intensely pleasurable - and oppressive. To start with what's oppressive. In some of the portraits of women the flesh of bare arms and shoulders looks powdered and resilient, as though they were blown up from some specially luxurious surgical rubber and then talcumed. The men meanwhile might have been groomed for the television lights. The finish is smooth, precise and brilliant. The brush-strokes are hardly visible, and you have to look closely to see how the paint was applied. It is as though these people have been expensively transformed by some cosmetic process into Ingres-flesh. And in a way - though Ingres complained that the fees paid for small pictures were not worth the effort - they have been.

LRB 4 March 1999 | PDF Download