Art, politics, and the politics of art: Ingres's Saint Symphorien at the 1834 Salon

When the doors of the Louvre opened at noon on March 1, 1834, the public received its first glimpse of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres's long-awaited painting Le Martyre de Saint Symphorien (The Martyrdom of Saint Symphorien, Fig. 1). Commissioned by the government in 1824, this picture had been expected at the Salon as early as 1827; (1) its unveiling seven years later was thus the denouement to nearly a decade of speculation and intrigue in the Parisian art world. Although the response of the typical Salon goer failed to live up to the advance publicity surrounding the painting, the enthusiasm of the crowd being directed toward the other major headliner of the 1834 Salon, Paul Delaroche's Lady Jane Grey (Fig. 2), its much heralded debut sparked a controversy of extraordinary intensity in the press. Shortly after the opening of the exhibition, one critic predicted that Saint Symphorien would become "the focus of every discussion, the object of ridiculous praise as well as perhaps exaggerated criticism." (2) Th ese words proved prophetic, and the subsequent avalanche of contrasting critical opinion became the stuff of legend--at least for a few decades. (3) More recently, of course, the controversy over Ingres's picture has been overshadowed by the art historical preoccupation with--one is tempted to say fetishization of--the various "scandals" provoked by subsequent generations of the burgeoning avant-garde, most particularly Gustave Courbet, Edouard Manet, and the Impressionists. (4) The critical reaction to Saint Symphorien is now generally remembered (if at all) as the event that finally pushed Ingres over the edge--the setback that prompted the ever-irascible artist to renounce official government commissions, close his thriving atelier, and declare his intention never again to participate in the Salon.

While overlooked in more general histories of nineteenth-century French art, what we might call the "Saint Symphorien affair" has been a consistent feature in the literature on Ingres. For the most part, this episode has been interpreted psychobiographically as yet another manifestation of the artist's notoriously childlike hypersensitivity--his almost comical inability to countenance criticism of any kind, particularly from the press. This article will argue that both Saint Symphorien and the critical reactions it elicited in 1834 are of considerable more interest than that. A systematic examination of the actual reviews of the painting will serve as a case study in the sheer complexity of art criticism during the volatile early years of the July Monarchy. (5) In 1834, Ingres was subjected to a panoply of critical opinion of unprecedented diversity and scope, as the writing on Saint Symphorien ran the gamut from the fawningly adulatory to the insultingly belligerent, from the pompously earnest to the mischie vously irreverent, from the rabidly political to the socially disengaged, from the brilliantly insightful to the mind-numbingly banal. Under such circumstances controversy was all but inevitable, the unavoidable result of the conflicting interests of the increasingly heterogeneous pool of men and women who had been vested with the authority to write about art. What many of these critics objected to most about Saint Symphorien was neither its form nor content (although these were certainly subjects of intense debate), but rather the alleged pretense of the artist and his "coterie" of supporters to enact a kind of artistic coup d'etat--to subvert the complex, messy process through which artistic supremacy had come to be bestowed in the modern era in order to impose on the public a highly particularized brand of art making, the superiority of which was deemed to be beyond dispute. Such fears were not unfounded. As I argue in the final section of this article, Ingres's despair at the failure of Saint Symphorien a nd his subsequent abandonment of the Salon constituted more than a recurring bout of paranoia; these were well-considered actions motivated by the artist's growing disenchantment with the official, institutionalized system through which art had come to be produced and consumed in nineteenth-century France.

Ingres's histrionics, together with incomplete knowledge of the actual critical reaction to Saint Symphorien in 1834, have led to the dissemination of certain myths and half-truths about this crucial episode. Most important, scholars have come to assume that the picture was a complete critical flop--that it garnered nothing but ridicule and contempt from reviewers. (6) This was far from the case. Of the sixty-three reviews I have been able to consult that make more than passing reference to Saint Symphorien, thirty-five can he described as hostile, while twenty-five are supportive and three neutral or effectively noncommittal. Thus, even though a slight majority of the critics did condemn Saint Symphorien, Ingres found a considerable number of defenders in the press, many of whom were as vehement in their support as his opponents were in their denunciations.