The past decade or so has seen the emergence of a great deal of stimulating writing on Ingres, including important work by Carol Ockman, Adrian Rifkin, Susan Siegfried, and others.[1] One defining characteristic of this new writing is its interest in and acceptance of tensions and paradoxes in Ingres’s work and reception. As Siegfried writes in the introduction to a special issue of Art History devoted to the artist, the “new way of thinking about Ingres . . . illuminates the artist as a subject of contradictions, which are . . . constitutive of his practice and deeply embedded as well in critical and art-historical writings on him” (651). Andrew Shelton’s book shares this interest in contradiction, but sees it in terms of a strategic question: how could “an academically indoctrinated artist . . . establish his supremacy in what was essentially a post-academic age?” (11) In seeking an answer to this question, Shelton focuses on Ingres’s exhibition practice and critical reception between 1834 and 1855, a period often characterized as one of semi-retirement for the artist. Shelton resists this characterization and argues instead that during this time Ingres continuously and subtly manipulated exhibition rhetoric and the contemporary press in...