Art, politics, and the politics of art: Ingres's Saint Symphorien at the 1834 Salon

When the doors of the Louvre lay opened at noon on March 1 1834 the public received its first glimpse of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres's long-awaited painting Le Martyre de Saint Symphorien (The Martyrdom of Saint Symphorien, Fig. 1) Commissioned by dint of the government in 1824, this picture had been awaited at the Salon as early as 1827; (1) its unveiling seven years later was thus the denouement to nearly a decade of speculation and intrigue in the Parisian art world. Although the rejoinder of the typical Salon goer failed to live up to the advance publicity surrounding the painting, the enthusiasm of the horde being directed toward the other major headliner of the 1834 Salon, Paul Delaroche's Lady Jane Grey (Fig. 2) its a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of heralded debut sparked a dispute of extraordinary intensity in the pres Shortly after the opening of the exhibition, single critic predicted that Saint Symphorien would become "the focus of each discussion, the object of ridiculous praise as well as perhaps exaggerated criticism." (2) Th ese words prov prophetic, and the later avalanche of contrasting critical opinion became the raw material of legend--at least for a small in number decades. (3) More recently, of course, the discussion over Ingres's picture has been overshadowed through the art historical preoccupation with--one is put to trialed to say fetishization of--the various "scandals" provok by dint of subsequent generations of the burgeoning avant-garde, greatest in quantity particularly Gustave Courbet, Edouard Manet, and the Impressionists. (4) The critical reaction to Saint Symphorien is now generally remembered (if at all) as the occurrence that finally pushed Ingres above the edge--the setback that alerted the ever-irascible artist to renounce official rule commissions, close his thriving atelier, and declare his intention not at any time again to participate in the Salon.

While view from aboveed in more general histories of nineteenth-century French art, what we might call the "Saint Symphorien affair" has been a consistent feature in the literature upon Ingres. For the most part, this episode has been interpreted psychobiographically as nevertheless another manifestation of the artist's notoriously childlike hypersensitivity--his almost comical inability to countenance criticism of any kind, particularly from the pres This article will argue that one as well as the other Saint Symphorien and the critical reactions it elicited in 1834 are of considerable more interest than that. A systematic examination of the actual reviews of the painting will obey as a case study in the sheer complexity of art criticism during the volatile early years of the July Monarchy. (5) In 1834 Ingres was make subordinateed to a panoply of critical opinion of unprecedent diversity and view as the writing on Saint Symphorien ran the gamut from the fawningly adulatory to the insultingly belligerent, from the pompously earnest to the mischie vously irreverent, from the rabidly political to the socially disengaged, from the brilliantly insightful to the mind-numbingly banal. below such circumstances controversy was all on the contrary inevitable, the unavoidable result of the conflicting interests of the increasingly heterogeneous pond of men and women who had been dressed with the authority to write about art. What many of these critics phenomenoned to most about Saint Symphorien was neither its form nor easy in mind (although these were certainly make subordinates of intense debate), but rather the alleged pretense of the artist and his "coterie" of supporters to enact a kind of artistic coup d'etat--to reverse the complex, messy process from one side which artistic supremacy had approach to be bestowed in the fresh era in order to impose upon the public a highly particularized brand of art making, the superiority of which was thinked to be beyond dispute. of the like kind fears were not unfounded. As I argue in the final section of this article, Ingres's despair at the failure of Saint Symphorien a nd his after abandonment of the Salon constituted more than a recurring turn of paranoia; these were well-considered actions motivated by dint of the artist's growing disenchantment with the official, institutionalized combination of parts to form a whole through which art had tend hitherward to be produced and consum in nineteenth-century France.

Ingres's histrionics, together with incomplete knowledge of the actual critical reaction to Saint Symphorien in 1834 have l to the dissemination of certain myths and half-truths about this crucial episode. greatest in quantity important, scholars have come to assume that the picture was a consummate critical flop--that it garnered nothing on the contrary ridicule and contempt from reviewers. (6) This was far from the case. Of the sixty-three reviews I have been able to confer that make more than passing respect to Saint Symphorien, thirty-five can he described as hostile, while twenty-five are supportive and three neutral or effectively noncommittal. Thus, level though a slight majority of the critics did doom Saint Symphorien, Ingres found a considerable number of asserters in the press, many of whom were as vehement in their support as his adverse partys were in their denunciations.