This lecture explores Ingres’s portraits from the 1820s and his sympathetic response to new features of appearance, as the bourgeoisie created its own way of styling the body and the head so as to display its ethics and aesthetics. The role of the hairdresser as a rival artist is also examined, along with the cultural symbolism and political connotations of the dressed head.

Susan L. Siegfried received her PhD from Harvard University and has taught at the University of Leeds in Great Britain, where she directed the MA in the Social History of Art, and at Northwestern University in the United States. Her major research has been on European art of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, especially the French art world of the Revolutionary and Romantic periods. Her research interests include the thematisation of gender, social spaces for viewing art, and theoretical models of interpretation. She is currently preparing a book on Ingres, as a central figure in the emergence of new imaginative paradigms informing artistic practice and responses to art in the early nineteenth century. She has organized and contributed to major exhibitions in her field (The Age of Watteau, Chardin and Fragonard: Masterpieces of French Genre Painting, National Gallery of Canada, National Museum of Art, and Gemaldegalerie, 2003-4; The Art of Louis-Léopold Boilly, Kimbell Art Museum and National Gallery of Art, 1995-6; and Works by J.-A.-D. Ingres in the Collection of the Fogg Art Museum, 1980). In previous work for the J. Paul Getty Trust, Los Angeles, she helped develop national and international policy for the arts and humanities in the area of information policy; publications in this area include "The Policy Landscape" in The Politics of Culture, 2000.