Background
From early in Ingres' career, the Romantic movement threatened the neoclassical approach to art, which had developed in part from the way France then saw herself as the cultural center of Europe, a successor to Rome. Painting became freer and more expressive, more concerned with colour than line or form, and more focused on artistic style than subject matter. Paintings based on major classical themes, painstakingly built up from highly described small details, fell out of fashion, replaced by regard for the holistic form of the work, and contemporary rather than historical settings. Ingres resisted this move away from academic art, and wrote, "The history painter shows the species in general; while the portrait painter represents only the specific individual—a model often ordinary and full of shortcomings."
As a struggling young artist, however, Ingres' income depended on commissioned portraits, a genre he despised as lacking the grandeur of classical subject matter and which became a lifelong burden. He agreed to commissioned portraits, which brought him renown. With his early financial difficulties behind him, by the 1830s though by then acclaimed as a portraitist and much sought-after by patrons, he was accepting few commissions, preferring to work on historical subject matter. He wrote in 1847, "Damned portraits, they are so difficult to do that they prevent me getting on with greater things that I could do more quickly".
With the Bertin commission, Ingres was sufficiently moved by the subject's strong personality to accept the undertaking. Bertin, who was 66 in 1832, probably came into contact with Ingres via his son Édouard Bertin, a student of the painter from 1827 or the art critic on the Journal, Ingres's friend Étienne-Jean Delécluze. He was a leader of the French upper class and a supporter of Louis-Philippe. Backed by the Bourbon Restoration, Bertin directed the Moniteur until 1823, when the Journal des débats became the recognised organ of the liberal-constitutional opposition after he had come to criticize absolutism. Bertin gave his support, however, to the July Monarchy after 1830.
Read more about this topic: Portrait Of Monsieur Bertin
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