Although the young painter was now entitled to a sojourn of five years in Italy, such was the reduced state of the French national finances that his departure for Rome was indefinitely postponed. In the meantime he was accorded a studio in the deserted convent of the Capuchins in Paris, where with several other artists he pursued his studies. Poor and without commissions, save a few chance orders, or a stray job for some bookseller, Ingres worked assiduously at drawings and studies in color, producing also a number of works which have since become famous--a portrait of his father, one of himself at twenty-four (now at Chantilly), portraits of Monsieur and Madame Rivière (in the Louvre), 'La belle Zélie' (Rouen Museum), two portraits of Napoleon Bonaparte, and others, in which, as Delaborde has said, "he showed, as boldly and forcibly as at the end of his career, all the strong, realistic qualities which form the basis of his art."
At length, in 1806, he was enabled to go to Italy, where he remained for eighteen years, during the first five of which he was a pensioner of the French Academy in Rome, then established in the Villa Medici. He now found himself able to study at the fountainhead both ancient and Renaissance art, and was transported by the beauty of the works of the sixteenth-century Italian painters--especially by those of Raphael, whom he always regarded as the greatest of all masters.
Ingres' work gained steadily in strength and vigor, and his individuality developed rapidly. Departing from the cold formalism of David, he turned to nature for his inspiration and gave a greater semblance of life to his figures than was in strict accordance with the code of the classicists. 'OEdipus and the Sphinx,' the first work sent by him from Rome to Paris, gave evidence that the young pensioner of the French Academy was already in possession of his powers, and that however severely he might be criticized for the singularity of his works, he was undoubtedly some one to be counted with.
Soon after painting his 'OEdipus' he began the 'Venus Anadyomene' which was finished many years later. These works were followed by some of his finest portraits, and, in 1811, he completed 'Jupiter and Thetis,' a large canvas now in the Museum of Aix. 'Romulus and Acron' and 'Virgil reading the Æneid' followed; then came 'The Betrothal of Raphael,' 'Don Pedro kissing the Sword of Henry IV.', 'The Sistine Chapel,' and 'The Large Odalisque.' 'The Death of Leonardo da Vinci' and 'Henry IV. and the Spanish Ambassador' were painted in 1817; 'Roger liberating Angelica' and 'Francesca da Rimini' were finished two years later. But whatever the subject or the treatment, none of his works found favor in France. The classicists looked upon him as a renegade from their ranks, and, strangely enough, it was only by Delacroix and a few others of the so-called romanticists (regarded by Ingres with openly expressed abhorrence) that the merit of his works seems at that time to have been recognized.