In addition to the honors which had been conferred upon Ingres by his own country, he had been elected a member of the Academies of Florence, Amsterdam, Antwerp, Berlin, and Vienna; had been made a Chevalier of the Order of Civil Merit of Prussia; a Commander of the Order of Leopold of Belgium; a Chevalier of the Order of St. Joseph of Tuscany; and had received the grand cross of the Order of Guadaloupe. The Art of Ingres CHARLES BLANC 'GAZETTE DES BEAUX-ARTS' 1868 We have heard eminent artists, who in other respects admired Ingres, deplore the influence he exercised upon the French school of painting by reason of the despotic nature of his teaching and the fact that his eccentric sayings, regarded as they were as oracular, unfortunately carried with them in the eyes of his prejudiced followers all the weight of serious opinions. Such criticism has given us food for thought, and it is not without having duly considered it that we now express our views regarding Ingres and the rôle he played as leader of the French school.... The violent reaction of the romanticists against the too-sculptural tendencies of David led, as all reactions do lead, to another extreme. Arriving in France, as he did after his sojourn in Italy, in the midst of the fray, Ingres saw with astonishing clearness in what respects the school of David had erred, and also what justice there was at bottom in the revolt of the romanticists. He saw that in a generalization of form, in an adoption of the type of statues, of the Greek profile, and of sculpturesque draperies, a cold and conventional quality had been imparted to the painting of his former co-disciples. Struck by what was natural, interesting, and essentially naïve in the work of the Italian artists of the fifteenth century, he felt that true style was only to be obtained from a profound study of nature, which alone produces an endless variety of forms; that any general type of beauty must be modified by a reference to the individual--if need be, even by characteristic ugliness--and that, finally, universal truth could be attained only by a treatment of individual truth. In this he was more of a painter than David; he reformed the reform of his master. Ingres, then, was the first to have a conception of actual truth; the first to know that in art the ideal is the quintessence of the real; that style should be derived not from erudition, but from life; that it may be acquired from the most commonplace models; that it must be _human_....