Wen Duan Honggang
In his later years, the famous French academic painter and neoclassical master Ingres (1780-1867) accepted a very important creative task, according to the requirements of Prince Napoleon, to paint a panoramic body art work, aiming to show girls of different nationalities, different skin colors and different personalities in the painting, so as to reflect the aesthetic principle of classical art "quiet greatness, sublime simplicity".
Ingres was well aware of the great responsibility, and after accepting the task in 1848, he began a long road of observation of life. He walked the streets of Paris countless times, carefully observing all kinds of girls passing by, from their looks, postures, looks, and words and deeds, he observed them in detail.
In order to make the girls in his pen more vivid and realistic, Ingres even disguised himself and mixed into the women's bath, witnessing many images of "bathing beauties", and every time he witnessed it, he would quickly go home and start drawing.
In this way, after accumulating a lot of material for seven years, he did not start drawing until 1855, during which he continued to adjust and revise the drawings. Another seven years later, in 1862, Ingres finally completed the masterpiece, which he called The Hammam.
In this work, Ingres gives full play to the creative techniques and aesthetic tastes of the academic school. With solid and profound modeling skills and fine and rigorous brushstrokes, more than 20 girls with different skin colors, different appearances, different postures and different temperaments are depicted, and the youthful vitality and style of young girls are displayed in a wonderful way, it can be said that this oil painting represents the peak of female human body oil painting in the history of Western art.
In terms of color, Angle pursues the harmonious unity of artistic color and natural color, and all colors are perfectly integrated, constituting a model of formal beauty and implicit beauty.
Ingres is known as the "banner figure of neoclassicism", good at creating female body paintings, and he admired the "classical laws" of respecting natural beauty, real beauty and rational beauty created by the Renaissance painting master Raphael (1483-1520), and in his creation, he has always practiced these ideas.
When creating "Turkish Bath", in order to pursue the perfection of the shape, Ingres deliberately weakened the contrast between light and shadow, completely in accordance with the aesthetic ideals in his heart, and beautified all female figures with delicate and gentle brushstrokes, so from this work, he can naturally feel the elegant, holy, aesthetic and quiet artistic style, and can hardly find flaws.
Through this work, Ingres put all his perception of the art of oil painting, all his understanding of beauty, all his cognition of the female world, and the painting language he created with his life's energy, all of which were unreservedly displayed in this work, creating a peak for neoclassical body art and providing a beautiful copy of the blueprint for future generations of painters.
Overall, "Turkish Bath" has three distinct artistic characteristics.
First, the composition of the work is very delicate and layered, reflecting the perfect unity of form and content.
Angle uses oval composition, all women are arranged into an oval structure, the women in the picture are near and far small, the layers are clear, each woman's action posture, including standing, sitting, lying down, mostly using soft, round curves to outline the shape, the decorations in the painting, such as vases, teapots, teacups, oil lamps and other objects, in the shape of the same curve-based, all the circles are combined together, forming a round, sweet visual melody, so that the form and content are very cleverly combined, It embodies a strong artistic tension.
Second, the color as a whole is relatively simple, there is no too full and bright color, reflecting the soft and quiet interest, in the subtleties, but also through the subtle tone change to achieve the balance of color transition, no sense of abruptness, effectively set off the details of the picture elements.
The colors in this painting are relatively close in general, looking close to the color of the skin itself, showing a simple, soft and elegant visual effect.
If you look deeply, you can see that the painter achieves subtle tonal changes through different skin tones on the human body, as well as the light and shade changes of light, which appear both peaceful and natural, but also exquisite and real, which not only reflects the vividness of the details, but also strengthens the rhythm of the picture.
Third, there are not only many characters in the picture, but also the body language of the characters is very rich, drawing the uniqueness of each character, and perfectly combining the dynamic beauty and static beauty of the characters.
"Turkish Bath" has created a total of more than 20 girls with different skin tones, there are whites, there are blacks, there are asians, it is more difficult to just shape the appearance characteristics of different races, but Ingres is not satisfied with these superficial articles, he gives each woman a different posture, these postures are feminine and charming, which not only shows the personality characteristics of different women, but also shows the common spiritual outlook of women, and the mood of all the characters constitutes a harmonious life picture, highlighting what Angle believes that "beauty is harmony" Artistic concept.