Sarah Betzer’s Ingres and the Studio: Women, Painting, History opens with a detail of the head of the Valpinçon Bather (1808). Turning the page, the reader is confronted with the steady gaze of Madame de Moitessier, the subject of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’s striking 1856 portrait. This pairing visualizes the central problem Betzer seeks to engage: how did Ingres, a history painter who decisively turned attention to the eroticized female form, conceive of portraits of women? And what did the women who sat for these portraits desire to see in them?

Betzer’s book is a detailed and sophisticated examination of the portraiture of Ingres and his students, including Victor Mottez, Henri Lehmann, Théodore Chassériau, and Amaury-Duval, among others. This monograph joins a rich body of specialist studies on Ingres and ingrisme, with her contribution addressing the portraits of women made by Ingres and his associates after 1825. She argues that the “formal and ideational tendency toward abstraction and the refinement of an approach to portraiture as history—shared by master and student alike—must be solidly rooted in the artistic networks of the ingriste circle” (226–27). Her reading thus posits the ingriste approach to portraiture as an extension of the practice of history painting. For Ingres and his students, this was a practice that included preparatory studies, the search for corresponding historical models, and an emulative engagement with recent portraiture. These artists produced portraits of women that balanced the need for contemporaneity, expressed through fashion and setting, with the aim of creating monumental images. Significantly, the networks Betzer describes included the female sitters themselves, who were neither passive nor self-absorbed consumers of their own images. Rather, they participated in the ingriste project, simultaneously producing a new notion of elite femininity that was artistically, intellectually, and politically engaged. To articulate this, Betzer introduces the concept of the “sitter’s share” (13), defined as “scrutinizing the traces of the roles played by portrait sitters in the consolidation of their own depicted form and in ingriste aesthetics more broadly” (234).

Betzer’s first two chapters situate ingriste portrait practice within the context of academic artistic debates and the tradition of female portraiture. In chapter 1, “The Ingriste Portrait as History,” Betzer turns her attention to Ingres’s two portraits of Madame Moitessier. She links Ingres’s portraiture with eighteenth-century precedents, making a well-drawn comparison to Jean-Marc Nattier’s practice, as well as a more conventional connection to Ingres’s master, Jacques-Louis David. Betzer’s discussion of the development of these two portraits exemplifies her method: a careful reconstruction of the final images in relation to preparatory studies, academic theory, and other images produced by the ingriste group. On the basis of this evidence, she claims that the 1856 portrait of Madame Moitessier approached Ingres’s vision of portraiture as history painting. For the artist, portrait making involved two processes: “on the one hand, he describes a process of idealization from nature while, on the other, he specifies that the formal conditions of that idealization are stylized monumentalization” (60). Madame Moitessier becomes a “modern goddess” figured in a contemporary Parisian salon. Betzer claims that for Ingres and his students, “it was above all the female sitter who proved best suited for this highly charged procedure of control and transformation” (64). Here readers might note Betzer’s own challenging balancing act: she has her eye literally and figuratively on Ingres’s, and his students’, artistic production, yet she also wishes to trace the “sitter’s share,” the investment of female portrait subjects in their image. She provides detailed description and analysis of the development of these portraits in the context of the friendships and aesthetic relations between ingriste artists and their artworks and between artists and sitters. Yet in doing so, she has less time to regard the sitters as subjects, leaving the reader to wonder if this was due to a lack of historical information.

The critical issue in chapter 2 is the development of an ingriste studio identity. Between 1833 and 1870, the artists in Ingres’s circle exhibited eighty female portraits at the Salons. For the sitters, these images revised the limited notions of femininity then in circulation. Ingriste portraits of women, Betzer notes, transformed conventional markers of gender. Women became sculptural, illegible, even monstrous, because they were no longer defined by their erotic desirability for men. For ingriste artists, these portraits shaped a collective artistic identity that challenged the theory and practice of the academy. This group saw their portraits as revised and modern history paintings—a form that at once engaged the present, and situated it firmly in relation to a past defined by the artistic exemplars (Phidias and Raphael) identified by Ingres. In ingriste terms, it was the failure of those who immediately preceded them—notably Ingres’s own master, David—that caused history painting to be distanced from contemporary life and in danger of disappearing altogether.

The subsequent three chapters turn to specific “portrait episodes,” featuring Julie Mottez, Marie d’Agoult, and Mademoiselle Rachel. All three women were considerable artists or writers and public figures of high standing whose portraits were seen in the Parisian Salon exhibitions. In chapter 3, “Julie Mottez, Rome, and Ingriste Myths of Origin,” Betzer addresses Victor Mottez’s 1836–37 frescoed portrait of his wife, Julie, as an example of the “portrait as history,” but also as an instance of female subjectivity asserting itself in the process of portrait making. While Julie does figure as, in Betzer’s terms, “a sign or signifying element for this male artistic community” (141), her own efforts as an artist and collector are significant and afforded her limited participation in the ingriste studio. While Betzer presents her as a “modern Dibutades” (a Greek woman credited with the invention of drawing), this was in part because of her willingness to pose for her husband’s colleagues. Julie’s active role in her portrayal stands as an important corrective to the potential to construe her as a passive object. However, Betzer’s point may be a bit too strongly made, as it would be hard to imagine Victor in the same situation as Julie: would he have sat for his portrait to his wife’s female artist friends?

In chapter 4, Betzer’s conception of the sitter’s share comes to the fore in her analysis of Henri Lehmann’s portraits of Marie d’Agoult. Betzer delineates the intellectual development of d’Agoult as an art critic in tandem with her representational development as a portrait subject. In particular, Betzer emphasizes the struggle of d’Agoult and ingriste artists to articulate visually the characteristics of the female intellectual. She traces a visual and verbal struggle between traits that could be read either as feminine or masculine. For d’Agoult, androgyny was the ideal, and in her role as salonnière she refused to yield pride of place to “men of genius” (169). The terms of Ingres’s studio—“where intellect and the powerful female body came together to create a timeless ideal” (178)—were met best in Lehmann’s 1839 “Roman” portrait of d’Agoult. A portrait that began as a private commission became a public image of d’Agoult as a writer, a salonnière, and a sibyl, at the intersection of the real and the ideal.

In the final chapter, Betzer introduces the critical failure of Amaury-Duval’s painting Tragedy (Portrait of Rachel) (1854–55). This portrait emphasized the sculptural clarity of the figure to delineate a modern subject traced through a specifically Mediterranean (read, Jewish) antiquity. Rachel’s own artistic practice as an actress aligned with ingriste ideals, in that the primary aesthetic touchstone for her performance was Greek sculpture. Unfortunately, the portrait was treated harshly because of its “unsettling, jarring, to-and-fro between ‘Rachel’ and ‘Tragedy,’” which meant that it could neither succeed “as straightforward symbol nor as portrait” (208). In Betzer’s reading, the critics wished to see either an unmediated representation of Rachel as a “sensual Jewess” or as an “idealized female body.” Instead, what Amaury-Duval and Rachel produced in tandem was an image that emphasized the modern Parisian Rachel’s connection to Greek and Roman antiquity, figured by the inclusion of the figure of Melpomene, muse of tragedy. For contemporary viewers, this created an “unbridgeable gap” between past and present, leading to an interpretive instability—a mode later prized by Walter Benjamin insofar as it opens up a space for the viewer to make meaning, but rejected by mid-nineteenth-century viewers as insufficient. Betzer’s explication of this portrait and her discussion of Benjamin’s conception of allegory is suggestive, but given its importance to her analysis, it deserves further discussion. However, Betzer’s articulation of the intersubjective, ingriste practice of portrait painting that included, but also extended beyond, the artist-sitter relationship substantiates her central argument: for these artists and sitters, portraiture was located firmly in networks that confirmed and extended social and artistic relations.

Betzer’s thorough and readable account highlights Ingres’s position as a member and the head of an active artistic community. Her project responds to Ingres’s nineteenth-century critics who perceived his and his students’ work as conservative throwbacks. She rejects this assessment, not simply to resuscitate their work, but rather to reframe the ingriste project, to escape the “seduction” of his contemporaries’ critical view—the belief that ingriste painting was “arcane,” out of touch, and at odds with the retrospectively valorized “painting of modern life” (14–15). Betzer concludes that ingriste female portraiture translated history painting into the modern world by producing images of women that blended classical tradition with contemporary femininity. Her meticulous analysis of the portraits made by Ingres and his circle rewards the reader with a deeper understanding of the aesthetic and gendered politics of portrait production at a moment in which artists and writers were grappling with the terms of modernity in relation to its transformative political, social, and artistic effects.