Looking Through Art Books

My daughter gave me Sebastian Smee's fascinating book about rivalries between artists, Lucien Freud, for instance, and Francis Bacon, or Manet and Degas, for which Smee set the situation up by referencing the work of Ingres, perhaps the most celebrated and accomplished draftsman since the lead pencil was invented.  Luckily I have gathered over the years the catalogues of all the major exhibitions from the Hermitage to the Prado to the Louvre to the Met, oh, I could pretentiously go on for some time.  Shelf upon shelf groan in my living room with these great tomes which even hard bound I can scarcely lift, especially not now in my extreme dotage.  Luckily Richard is here to lift a great weight of them down at once.  I well remember an old bibulous dowager in Cambridge who fell on the stairs and broke her neck carrying, God bless her!, a case of good burgundy up from her cellar.  Way to go, dear!  I have been spending the last few days leafing through a gigantic catalogue of a Ingres portraits put on about twenty years ago at the Met.  There is a lot of Ingres in the States so that the Met was able to borrow freely, and the show of the drawings is unprecedentedly large.  Apart from the breathtaking skill and control exhibited in every drawing there is nothing more fun for someone who grew up gossiping in a small Iowa town than to read the capacious entries on each entry detailing in what can be considered a small town's gossiper every detail of their legitimate relationships, the illicit ones, the children, the maiden aunts, the friends, who was helping whom get ahead at court, all the background detail that then come to life so brilliantly in the eyes, the smiles, the creases around the mouth, the gesture of the hands.  It is soap opera of a very exalted kind avant la lettre