Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (pronounced Ang´gr) was born at Montauban in the south of France, on August 29, 1780. His father, Jean-Marie-Joseph Ingres, was by profession a house-decorator, with talents so versatile that he was also to some extent painter, sculptor, architect, and musician as well. It was he who gave the first instruction in drawing and in music to his son, who, from the outset, showed so much ability in both that it was a question which should be adopted as his life-work. Apparently the boy received but little schooling, but before he was twelve years old had acquired such proficiency as a violinist that he was accepted as a member of the orchestra of the theater of Toulouse, where on one memorable occasion he played a concerto by Viotti so skilfully that it called forth hearty applause. Deeming music to be more remunerative than painting, his parents wished him to devote himself to it professionally. This did not, however, prevent their sending him to the painter Vigan, in Toulouse, for instruction in drawing, and under his guidance Ingres followed the course prescribed by the Academy of that city, in which Vigan was a professor. Later he entered the studio of Roques, a painter who had been associated in Rome with Vien and David, but who, while adhering to their doctrines, had devoted much time to copying the works of the great Italians of the Renaissance. The sight of these copies--above all, of one of Raphael's 'Madonna of the Chair'--revealed to Ingres his true vocation, and thenceforth no doubt existed in his mind that he would devote his life to art. Whatever disappointment his parents may have felt to have the matter so decided, no opposition was made to his determination, and after a brief period of study under a landscape-painter--Briant, or, as M. Momméja says, Bertrand, by name--he started for Paris. There he soon obtained admission to the studio of Jacques-Louis David, then the acknowledged leader of the school of painting in France.