The National Gallery has its Portraits by Ingres while a short distance away in Piccadilly the Royal Academy of Art has pulled off yet another money-spinner with the water lilies of his countryman Monet.
"What a double whammy of French art," one critic noted when the exhibitions opened in London last month but while Monet attracts legions of art lovers to the Royal Academy, the Ingres exhibition is a much more intimate affair. To make the psychological leap over the mass marketing and hype of the Monet exhibition may be difficult for some visitors. But it is to the Royal Academy's immense credit that once more it has turned Monet into the type of event that is usually reserved for the arrival of a "must see" film or a "must read" novel. No visitor or resident in London can have failed to register Monet's triumphant arrival at the Royal Academy.
You just have to look at the numbers of posters at bus stops and on the Tube, in magazines and dial the number of the 24 hour telephone ticket line to get some sense of the money being made from Monet. If as some believe, Monet's appeal is that the fluidity of Impressionist art "invites us to have a go", then Ingres is at the opposite end of that continuum. Jean-Auguste Dominique Ingres, the portrait painter of First and Second Empire France, died in 1867 just as Monet was making a name for himself in the art world and as such the symmetry of exhibiting both painters at the same time in London is perfectly fitting.
The difference in their style is that whereas Monet's paintings absorb the visitor in light and water, Ingres challenges you not just to appreciate the richness of tapestry or imperial robes but to take a walk through history.
Descending a flight of stone stairs to enter the bowels of the Sainsbury Wing of the National Gallery, there cannot be a more dramatic image than that of Ingres's pompous, strident figure of Napoleon I on his Imperial Throne. Ingres, who was born in the southern French town of Montauban in 1780 and made his way to Paris in 1797 to study under the leading artist of the age, Jacques-Louis David, painted this splendidly boastful Napoleon in 1806 when he crowned himself Emperor. Napoleon stares down at you with such immense authority that even after looking at Ingres's portraits d'amitie of French officials in Rome between 1806-1820 it is hard to forget him sitting on his throne as Jupiter, with the outstretched wings of an eagle woven into the carpet at his feet.
After his portrait of an inflated Napoleon was criticised in the Salon in Paris, a deeply unhappy Ingres went to Rome where he secured the patronage of French officials living in the city following French occupation in 1808. Ingres stayed for 14 years and then went to Florence where he stayed for a further four years.
He returned to France in 1824 with a commission to paint The Vow of Louis XIII, which secured Ingres a successful reception at the Salon in Paris. He was acclaimed the leading painter of his age but Ingres painted few portraits during the next 10 years, devoting his energy to vast commissions decorating the ceiling in the Louvre and the altarpiece of Autun Cathedral. The final room of the Ingres exhibition is an absolute delight to the eye. In his later life Ingres indulged his passion for detail and observation of Parisian high society.
It took Ingres 12 years from 1844 to 1856 to complete the portrait of Madame Moitessier in her busily flowered dress as she stares nonchalantly from the canvas, during which time his first wife died and he remarried. A second painting of Madame Moitessier shows her seated in her salon about to depart for an evening's entertainment and though the elongated arms and flabby neckline might suggest a little too much honesty for madame, the portrait is exquisite in its detail.
The National Gallery has also cashed in on the cult of Ingres and doesn't shy away from the carrier bag, postcard approach in order to get the punters through the doors.