Le violon d’Ingres, a film by Cécile Favier, based on an original idea by Gaëlle Le Gallic, with Patrice Fontanarosa
Coproduction France 3 Sud, Caméra Lucida and the City of Montauban with the participation of the Musée Ingres, 52 minutes
"Le Violon d'Ingres", "Ingres's Violin": This common French expression refers to someone's favorite pastime. It is attributed to Ingres's well-known passion for the violin. What is the true story behind this saying?
Inside the trunks filled with his personal archive, which the painter J. A. D. Ingres bequeathed to his home town, Montauban, and amid thousands of sketches and preparatory studies for his paintings, the artist deliberately placed a violin. A modest violin. A violin made for practice and worn with age. Is this really the instrument on which Ingres played in the company of musician friends as famous as Paganini, Gounod or Liszt, sharing with them what was his second passion after painting? Nevermind, what remains is the symbol of a lost childhood, of the crucial period during which Ingres still hesitated between painting and music, the two disciplines in which he was tutored by his father.
This instrument with its feminine curves touchingly evokes the contradictory figure of an artist who hid his sensibility under the shell of a sensible bourgeois of the nineteenth century. An artist who was criticized by his contemporaries for being a Classicist in the time of Romanticism. But an artist as well who thirsted for the absolute and whose experiments influenced the most modern artists: Picasso, Matisse, Degas and even Man Ray. Both a Classical artist and a rebel, to sum it up.
This film is an introduction to the life and career of the man and the artist through his connection to music — his dearly loved music, "that art", which he said "was the perfume of his life."
Screenings in the "alvéole n°7" – Meeting Place for Groups, everyday, except Sunday, at 4:30 p.m. and late nights on Wednesdays and Fridays: screenings every hour from 4:30 to 7:30 p.m. (last screening).