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The Source (French: '''La Source''', meaning "[[Spring (hydrology)|spring]]") is an oil painting on canvas by French neoclassical painter Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. The work was begun in Florence around 1820 and not completed until 1856, in Paris.[1] [2] When Ingres completed The Source, he was seventy-six years old,[3] already famous,[4] and president of the École des Beaux-Arts. The pose of the nude may be compared with that of another by Ingres, the Venus Anadyomene (1848),[5] and is a reimagination of the Aphrodite of Cnidus or Venus Pudica.[6] Two of Ingres' students, painters Paul Balze and Alexandre Desgoffe, helped to create the background and water jar.[1]
The painting depicts a nude woman standing upright between an opening in the rocks and holding in her hands a pitcher, from which water flows. She thus represents a water source or spring, for which source is the normal French word, and which, in classical literature, is sacred to the Muses and a source of poetic inspiration.[7] She stands between two flowers, with their "vulnerability to males who wish to pluck them",[7] and is framed by ivy, plant of Dionysus the god of disorder, regeneration, and ecstasy.[7] The water she pours out separates her from the viewer, as rivers mark boundaries of which the crossing is symbolically important.[7]
Art historians Frances Fowle and Richard Thomson suggest that there is a "symbolic unity of woman and nature" in The Source, where the flowering plants and water serve as a background which Ingres fills with woman's "secondary attributes".[8]
The first exhibition of The Source was in 1856, the year it was completed.[9] The painting was received enthusiastically.[4] Duchâtel acquired the painting in 1857 for a sum of 25,000 francs. The state assumed title to the painting in 1878 and it passed to the Musée du Louvre. In 1986 it was transferred to the Musée d'Orsay.[1] The painting has been frequently exhibited and widely published.[1] [10]
Haldane Macfall in A History of Painting: The French Genius describes The Source as Ingres' "superb nude by which he is chiefly known".[11] Kenneth Clark in his book Feminine Beauty observed how The Source has been described as "the most beautiful figure in French painting."[12] Walter Friedländer in David to Delacroix referred to The Source simply as the most famous of Ingres' paintings.[13]
The model for the painting was the young daughter of Ingres' concierge.[11] In his Confessions of a Young Man, Irish novelist George Moore wrote, with relation to the morality of artistic production, "What care I that the virtue of some sixteen-year-old maid was the price for Ingres' La Source? That the model died of drink and disease in the hospital is nothing when compared with the essential that I should have La Source, that exquisite dream of innocence."[14]