Ingres versus Delacroix

Abstract

This article offers a reassessment of the origins and early history of the legendary rivalry between Jean‐Auguste‐Dominique Ingres and Eugène Delacroix. It argues that this dichotomy, which perpetuated the age‐old polarity of line versus colour in conventional French Academic theory, did not arise from the dramatic confrontations of the two artists' works at the Salons of 1824 and 1827–28, as is commonly assumed; rather, it emerged more fitfully over the course of the 1830s and 1840s. This belated and essentially retrospective personalization of the by‐then rather hackneyed and clichéd neoclassicism‐versus‐Romanticism debate is attributed to the emergence of a media‐driven cult of artistic celebrity and to the increasing politicization of the form– as well as the content – of cultural discourse in post‐Revolutionary, post‐Imperial France.

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