Already in this picture we see that Ingres was constitutionally incapable of sacrificing on any grounds his unconscious desire to imitate closely, of copying nature. In vain he tries to force himself to attain “style” in the group he has imagined. His group is not harmoniously arranged. It has no vital unity. Each of the figures appeared detached from the others; but they are drawn individually with so much realistic exactitude that the whole has the bizarre aspect of a photograph of an assembly of artists’ models trying different poses in a studio.
As M. de Wyzewa has well said, the young painter had received from heaven at his birth a defect and a quality which remained intimately connected with each other. The defect was a total absence of imagination, invention, or aptitude to raise himself above the reality directly offered to the painter by the sight present to his eyes; and the quality--the very excess of which was the inevitable cause of the defect I have just denoted--the quality was a marvellous, an absolutely exceptional power of seeing, of understanding, and of reproducing that reality. No painter has ever had a more exact vision of the human figure, nor hands more skilful to fix in its entirety on the paper or the canvas what his eyes saw. A Holbein even, with all the fidelity of his realism, was still troubled in his observation of the model by a shade of æsthetic idealism, by the preoccupation of an example to be followed, or by a new process to employ: between Dominique Ingres and his model, so long as he had this model in front of his eyes, no consideration of any kind could interpose itself. The painter was as possessed by his vision, as hypnotised by it, and he was forced to copy it without changing anything. He carried away, indeed, as the result of his stay in David’s studio, a body of doctrines to which he remained on the whole faithful all his life, but nature had given him gifts which were entirely different from those which were needed to put these doctrines into practice. And this explains why this great man, in the ignorance he always remained in of the real source of his originality and greatness, presents to us to-day the paradox of having been the most naturalistic of French painters, while obstinately attempting to make himself the most idealistic.