Source. The Source 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. When Ingres completed The Source, he was seventy-six years old, already famous, 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, and is a reimagination of the Aphrodite of Cnidus or Venus Pudica. Two of Ingres' students, painters Paul Balze and Alexandre Desgoffe, helped to create the background and water jar.
The painting depicts a nude 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.
She stands between two flowers, with their vulnerability to males who wish to pluck them, and is framed by ivy, plant of Dionysus the god of disorder, regeneration, and ecstasy. The water she pours out separates her from the viewer, as rivers mark boundaries of which the crossing is symbolically important. 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
The work was begun in Florence around 1820 and not completed until 1856, in Paris. When Ingres completed The Source, he was seventy-six years old, already famous, 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, and is a reimagination of the Aphrodite of Cnidus or Venus Pudica. Two of Ingres' students, painters Paul Balze and Alexandre Desgoffe, helped to create the background and water jar.
The painting depicts a nude 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.
She stands between two flowers, with their vulnerability to males who wish to pluck them, and is framed by ivy, plant of Dionysus the god of disorder, regeneration, and ecstasy. The water she pours out separates her from the viewer, as rivers mark boundaries of which the crossing is symbolically important. 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
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