Drawn, Printed, and Pasted: Ingres as Master Draughtsman Across Media

TEFAF Meet the Experts are interactive conversations around works of art presented at TEFAF. We hope these conversations encourage visitors to further engage with the incredible objects at the fair and learn from our vast network of knowledgeable experts. Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (Montauban 1780 - Paris 1867) completed one of his most ambitious portrait groups in 1849. The Gatteaux Family bears a dedication to one of the artist’s closest friends, Edouard Gatteaux. Ingres has here assembled three engravings, each after his own earlier portrait drawings, of Edouard Gatteaux, his father Nicolas-Marie Gatteaux, and his mother Louise-Rosalie Gatteaux. In this Meet the Experts, our expert, Stephen Ongpin will discuss the uniqueness of this graphic work in its method and composition, and the scale of this large and impressive sheet. Using single portraits made at different times, beginning in the 1820s, Ingres has created a composite family group and placed the whole in an elegant interior setting. Printed on thin paper, these three engravings were carefully silhouetted and laid down by the artist onto a much larger sheet, which he then overdrew in pencil in such a way that the seams between the different sheets of paper are hardly visible to the naked eye, while at the same time adding two other figures drawn in pencil. The present sheet has long been admired as one of Ingres’s most significant works on paper. Extensively published and widely exhibited since 1881, the drawing remained in the collection of the Gatteaux family and its descendants until 1931.