Portrait of Monsieur Bertin - Reception and Influence

Reception and Influence

Portrait of Monsieur Bertin was first exhibited at the 1833 Salon alongside his 1807 Portrait of Mme Devauçay. It met with universal praise, and became his most successful artwork to that point. It sealed his reputation as a portraitist; then as today it is considered his greatest male portrait. Ingres himself said "Since my portraits of Bertin and Molé, everybody wants portraits. There are six that I've turned down, or am avoiding, because I can't stand them". One contemporary critic compared the portrait to the work of German Balthasar Denner (1685–1749), a realist painter heavily influence by Jan van Eyck's forensic attention to detail. Denner, in the words of Ingres scholar Robert Rosenblum, "specialised in recording every last line on the faces of aged men and women, and even reflections of windows in their eyes." Another wrote "It is impossible to take truthfulness any further...This is a portrait that walks and talks."

The work's almost photographic realism gained a lot of attention when it was first exhibited, both positive and negative. Some saw it as an affront to Romanticism, while others saw its debt to the Flemish attention to detail served not only to show an acute likeness, but in its small highly described details builds a psychological profile of the sitter. Art historian Geraldine Pelles sees Bertin as "at once intense, suspicious, and aggressive". She notes that there is a certain amount of projection of the artist's own personality at play, and recalls Théophile Silvestre's description of Ingres; "There he was squarely seated in an armchair, motionless as an Egyptian god carved of granite, his hands stretched wide over parallel knees, his torso stiff, his head haughty".

Due to a changing political climate and an intellectual move away from generally literal academic art, Ingres' portrait came to represent the old guard for the following generation of artists. Its overwhelming masculinity, conveyed through the full frontal pose, sobriety, and close attention to the details of the sitter's face, skin and hair are in marked contrast to the then conventional portrayal of women, exemplified by Ingres' portrait of Mademoiselle Caroline Rivière. At the time, the newer guard of French portraits of women tended towards dreamy, soft focus and corporeal depictions.