Sunday, April 27, 2025

Art: The Dream of Ossian and the Strange Fever Dream of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres


Picture this: it’s 1813, and Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, one of the fussiest, starch-collared painters in French history, gets handed a golden ticket. Napoleon himself — the man who redrew the map of Europe by sheer force of ego— wants a painting for his Roman bedroom ceiling. It’s the kind of commission you could dine out on for the rest of your life. You might think, “I’ll paint him leading troops, or the gods crowning him with laurels, or, hell, riding a cannon into the sunset.”

Nope. Ingres goes rogue. He gives the Emperor a blind bard snoozing in a pile of rocks while ghost warriors and half-naked girlfriends float overhead like the world’s saddest Macy’s Parade. Welcome to The Dream of Ossian — a painting so weird, so wildly misplaced for its original purpose, it’s a wonder Ingres wasn’t sent to exile right alongside Napoleon.

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Reluctant Romantic

Ingres — that crotchety, pencil-thin High Priest of Line — made his career pretending he hated Romanticism. He wanted no part of all that gooey, emotional, chaotic drama that spilled out of Delacroix’s brush like red wine on white carpet. Ingres thought art should be rational, pure, like a geometry lesson handed down from Olympus.

But then he fell in love with James Macpherson’s Ossian, the Scottish literary scam that had Europe swooning for misty heroes and doomed love songs. Like a guy who claims he only listens to Bach but knows every word to Bohemian Rhapsody, Ingres couldn’t resist. The fake poetry of a fake bard hit him squarely in his fragile classicist heart.

Napoleon’s Ossian Obsession (Because of Course)

By the early 1800s, Napoleon wasn’t just a general. He was an emperor, a myth-in-the-making — and he needed the right soundtrack. Ossian, that mist-drenched, harp-strumming relic of a made-up ancient world, was perfect. Melancholy? Check. Heroic? Check. Pagan but noble enough to pass for classy? Double-check. It didn’t even matter that Macpherson basically invented Ossian out of thin air. In fact, that made it better. What is empire, after all, if not an elaborate invention?

Napoleon loved Ossian so much he commissioned paintings, operas, even interior decorations based on it. His architects commissioned artists like François Gérard and Anne-Louis Girodet to paint ethereal, floating warrior-ghosts to class up the place. Ossian fever swept the French art world like a bout of upper-crust food poisoning.

Ingres, seeing an opportunity to climb into the imperial good graces, chose Ossian for his ceiling commission. And in 1813, fresh off his success with Romulus’ Victory over Acron, he delivered The Dream of Ossian.

Only problem? Instead of glorifying empire, Ingres painted a funeral. A beautifully rendered, painfully frozen funeral of dreams past.

Sleep, Death, and a Parade of Regrets

At the center of the painting, poor blind Ossian slumps on his harp, a ghost dog loyally beside him. Above, in the misty firmament, float the vaporous echoes of his dead son Oscar, his maybe-wife Malvina, his father Fingal, assorted warriors, lovers, and fairy tale musicians playing ethereal tunes on golden harps. It’s like a heavenly LinkedIn profile of everyone Ossian ever loved, lost, or killed in battle.

The details are lush: arms extend pleadingly, shields glint faintly, figures fade into the mist like memories too painful to touch. And it’s all tinted with the emotional temperature of a tombstone.

Where Gérard’s earlier Ossian Evoking Phantoms was full of drama and swirling storm clouds, Ingres’ Ossian looks… tired. Beat down. Nostalgic. Not the vibe you want above your imperial four-poster bed when you’re plotting the conquest of Russia.

Ingres might have told himself he was painting a neoclassical history scene. But this isn’t history; this is memory — bruised, bruising, and already halfway to oblivion.

No Ceiling for You, Sir

Napoleon never slept under The Dream of Ossian. He got exiled, the monarchy fell apart, and Ingres’ sleepy bard was hauled out of the palace and lost for a while. Ingres, no fool, later bought the painting back in 1835, jammed it into a new rectangular frame (which he awkwardly adjusted, like trying to squeeze into your college jeans), and kept tinkering with it until he died.

Critics didn’t know what to do with it. Some (like Thomas B. Hess) admired its emotional guts; others (like Anita Brookner) thought it was “grisaille” garbage, a dull, lifeless mistake better left unmentioned. Modern viewers? We’re left staring at it the way you stare at an old photograph of your teenage self: confused, tender, a little embarrassed.

Dream or Eulogy?

In the end, The Dream of Ossian is not about triumph. It’s about nostalgia’s slow suffocation. It’s about how even the greatest warriors are reduced to fading memories and half-remembered songs. It’s a vision not of empire at its peak, but of ambition’s inevitable collapse.

Whether Ingres knew it or not, he painted a quiet obituary for Napoleon’s dreams — while they were still technically alive.

And maybe that’s why The Dream of Ossian feels oddly modern. Because it’s not about winning. It’s about losing, beautifully, and having just enough pride left to pretend you’re dreaming when you’re actually mourning.

When you dream about your victories… are you dreaming about what you’ve gained — or everything you’re afraid you’re already losing?

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