Eliezer et Rébecca

Eliezer and Rebecca from 1800 at the Musee de Marseille is a very early work showing Ingres still working in David's Neo-classical manner. The Old Testament subject of Abraham's servant finding a bride for Isaac was a standard academic composition that tested the artist's ability to organize a multi-figure narrative. Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, David's greatest pupil and the defender of the classical French tradition against the Romantic movement, dominated French painting through the middle decades of the nineteenth century from his position at the head of the Académie des Beaux-Arts and the École des Beaux-Arts. His doctrine of the primacy of line over color — inherited from David but pursued with a fanatical intensity David himself had not required — defined the terms of the great debate between Classicism (Ingres) and Romanticism (Delacroix) that structured French cultural life from the 1820s to the 1860s. His influence on subsequent French painting — including Degas, Renoir, and ultimately Picasso — was foundational.

The composition shows the young Ingres absorbing Davidian principles of figure arrangement and classical setting. The handling already shows signs of his distinctive precision.