When Delacroix was painting the "Expulsion of Heliodorus" in Saint Sulpice, he put forth the whole strength of his creative genius to avoid all reminiscence of Raphael's fresco. Ingres' power of invention consisted in discovering, with a weird certainty, whether the subject of which he wished to treat had already been painted by an Italian or other Classical master. The picture "Jupiter and Thetis," of 1811, is put together after a design on a Greek vase, and represents in its studied archaism the Æginetan period of his art. The "Vow of Louis XIII," of 1824, was his confession of faith as regards the Cinquecento. The motive was taken from the Madonna di Foligno, the curtains from the Madonna di San Sisto, the floating angels from the Madonna del Baldacchino, and the candlesticks as well as the little angels with the inscribed tablet are from the same source. It is all beautiful, of course, for it is all Raphael; only, it would have been more rational if Ingres had lived in the time of Raphael instead of in the nineteenth century. One would take the picture to have been painted under Raphael's eyes, and it bears to his works the same relation as Raphael's earlier pictures do to Perugino's. The "Christ giving the Keys to St. Peter" is also put together out of elements derived from the school of Urbino. In his "St. Symphorian," which was belauded as the _ne plus ultra_ of style, he turned by way of variety to the imitation of Michael Angelo: the action is violent, the muscles swollen. The "Apotheosis of Homer" is an admirable lecture in archæology, a sitting of the great academy of genius, in which the poses are so fine and the heads so full of marble idealism that in comparison with it Raphael's "School of Athens" has the effect of the wildest naturalism. [Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._ INGRES. STUDY FOR THE ODALISQUE IN THE LOUVRE.] Thus Father Ingres stands forth as a cold, stiff, academic painter, as a doctrinaire who has not progressed much further than the much-reviled David. He represents, as Th. Rousseau said, only to a moderate degree the good old art which we have lost. In the words of Diaz: "Let him be shut up with me in a tower, without engravings, and I wager that his canvas will remain untouched, whilst I shall succeed in producing a picture." He possessed an arid ability which leaves one cold in presence of even his most important works. How lifeless is the effect produced by his paintings of nude single figures, his "Odalisque" and his "Freeing of Andromeda," which brought him especial fame! Ingres could not paint flesh, and in this respect he is indicative of an enormous retrogression as compared with Prudhon. The striving after sculpturesque beauty, and, in connection therewith, the repression of all individuality, became in him almost a religion. [Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._ INGRES. THE SOURCE.]