Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, the first great radical of the nineteenth century, created a personal, sensual style that moved away from the Neoclassicists of the late eighteenth century evolving into a new, individual idealization of form through expressive use of line.

A master draughtsman, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, was born the son of a tailor. Originally studying under Jacques Louis David, he went on to work in Rome about 1807-20, where he began his Odalisque series of sensuous female nudes. He returned to France in 1824, staying the next ten years and receiving the official success and honors he had always craved.

In 1834, he accepted the Directorship of the French School in Rome, a post he retained for 7 years. He was a model administrator and teacher, but he produced few major works in this period. He was an effective teacher and was beloved by his students. The best known of them is Théodore Chassériau, who studied with him from 1830 until he closed his studio in 1834 to return to Rome. No other artist who studied under Ingres succeeded in establishing a strong identity; among the most notable of them were Jean-Hippolyte Flandrin, Henri Lehmann, and Eugène-Emmanuel Amaury-Duval.

His techniques were traditional, yet he created a very personal, sensual style of his own. He used thin, fluid paint and his touch was lively and descriptive and only blended in the figures. He was often criticized as a painter of the monochromatic, using color only as an afterthought but those flat areas of bright color have a powerful emotive and seductive effect not yet seen in paintings of that century which influenced many later artists, most notably Edgar Degas.

In 1841 he returned to France, once again acclaimed as the champion of traditional values. Ingres was obsessed by a restricted number of themes and returned to the same subject again and again over a long period of years. He was a bourgeois with the limitations of a bourgeois mentality, but his finest works are the product of a deeply sensuous nature.

Many postcards were made of Ingres' work, done long after his death. Most the the cards we see do not credit Ingres as the artist. This was common practice for paintings produced by large museums, as the focus was on the museum and not the older established artists they represented.