Ingres, Painter of Men

Abstract

This essay makes a case for the historical importance and cultural and psychic complexity of Jean‐Auguste‐Dominique Ingres's representations of men, which have tended to be neglected in favour of the painter's much more celebrated and more thoroughly scrutinized representations of women. It focuses on an unfinished portrait of the artist's oldest and dearest friend, Jean‐Pierre‐François Gilibert. I argue that Ingres foregrounded the physical allure and fashionability of his friend in this portrait, thereby overtly specularizing and covertly eroticizing him. The portrait is read as an artefact of an early ‘romantic’ phase of the two men's friendship, one that had to be disavowed in order for them to achieve heterosexual adulthood in accordance with the period's growing dichotomization of homosocial and homoerotic bonds between men. I trace the processes through which Ingres initially disavowed Gilibert – and ultimately, retrospectively re‐embraced him – via the complex role that the latter's portrait played in the decades‐long evolutionary saga of its erstwhile pendant, Ingres's celebrated Self‐Portrait at the Age of Twenty‐Four.