Oedipus and the Sphinx
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780-1867) · 1808, reworked c. 1827
Inside a rocky cave, a naked young man leans forward with one foot on a boulder, his elbow on his knee, and raises a finger toward the creature in front of him. Only the head, the breast, one paw and a wing of the Sphinx emerge from the darkness at the left. Oedipus holds two spears in his right hand, a piece of red drapery hangs from his shoulder, and in the lower left corner a human foot and a scatter of bones show what became of travellers who failed the riddle. Through the opening of the cave, a man in a red cap flees in terror toward the city of Thebes.
Ingres painted the figure in Rome in 1808, when he was twenty-eight and a pensioner of the French Academy there, and sent it to Paris as one of the works required of him. The nude was the main point: Oedipus is a demonstration of what he had learned from antique sculpture and from life drawing, with a smooth, enamel-like surface and a profile as clean as a cameo. Look at the way the body is lit against the dark rock, and at the calm, almost conversational gesture with which Oedipus gives the answer to the riddle: man, who walks on four legs, then two, then three. The signature and date are on the rock at the lower left.
The first version was an academic study of the figure alone; around 1827, before showing it at the Salon of that year, Ingres enlarged the canvas, added the fleeing man and the landscape, and turned an exercise into a history painting. He returned to the subject late in life. The Louvre received the picture in 1878 by bequest, and for Ingres it summed up the classical clarity he defended all his life against the Romantics.
Did You Know? Ingres later painted the confrontation again in reverse, with the Sphinx on the right, in a version now in Baltimore.
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