This private passion

What are we supposed to make of Ingres, the artist most represented, mostly with portrait drawings of an utterly familiar kind, some not in pristine condition, and with watercolours that are mere replicas often made long after the originals in oil? Particularly in the light of the exhibition devoted solely to Ingres at the National Gallery in 1999.

In one characteristic case, The Dream of Ossian, Winthrop's tiny watercolour version made two decades after Ingres had conceived and executed one of the most astonishing monuments of Romantic painting, is a wretched, meticulous little thing with not an ounce of power in it, utterly misleading in the impression that it gives.

What are we to make of Ingres paying homage to Raphael in the wildly silly evocation of all that approaches the ludicrous and nauseating in that great Renaissance painter's work?

Ingres portrayed him with his mistress on his knee and in every detail of gesture and expression, wide eye and limp hand, vile colour and sharp, unsympathetic light, crossed the border on the nasty, the right side of which Raphael almost always stayed.

The one surprise for those who know Ingres as primarily a portrait painter will be the pair of studies in oil for figures in his vast altarpiece, The Martyrdom of St Symphorien. These must have been made very late in the evolution of this picture, scarcely visible in its position in the cathedral of Autun in Burgundy, well after the composition had been established, and their function seems to have been the final resolution of poses and the clarification of such details as hands and feet.

They seem to indicate that Ingres continued to brood on such matters until the very moment when he had to paint them in the final version, and, even then, was prepared to make significant alterations.

Crowded and confused - "a macaroni of serpents", as one critic dubbed them - they demonstrate the energy and vigour of imagination and intelligence that Ingres could bring to bear on his work before, as in the altarpiece itself, relapsing into characteristic insipidity-For those who can see no fault in Ingres - and they are many (as they are for Raphael) - I commend a long, hard look at his Golden Age of 1862.

The curators have it that this is a "small but exquisite reduction" of a mural begun two decades earlier but left unfinished. Exquisite, however, is not the word for it: from any other painter's hand this frieze of posturing nudes would be at best described as satirical, facetious, wry or ironical; at worst as feeble and ridiculous, risible, vacuous, absurd.

As it is by Ingres at his most self-admiring and serious, we must stand in awe before naked figures ill-drawn and illproportioned and agree with him that it is "a la Raphael". The sane man wonders how the most revered painter in France could bear to put his signature to it.

Ingres dominates this tedious exhibition in number but not in size. Two large paintings by Gustave Moreau overwhelm another room and demonstrate how weak his work was on this scale.

His boy Jacob, almost naked, can hardly be said to wrestle with the lugubrious angel of indeterminate gender standing behind him, but at least, though ludicrous, he is proportionate; with so large a head, the naked boy in memory of Chassériau is not, yet when Moreau drew him from the life he opined that he had "never done a better; it is natural in its proportions ..."

Of Moreau's near contemporary, Burne-Jones, Winthrop's examples seem, with one exception, by no means of the highest quality - yet such things cost virtually nothing in the later years of Winthrop's buying.

The exception is Pan and Psyche, an exquisitely tender evocation of later 15th century painting in Florence and a picture that in technique and mood, Botticelli would immediately have understood.

Two paintings by Holman Hunt - The Triumph of the Innocents and The Miracle of Sacred Fire - are as particularly nasty as the Sir Galahad by GF Watts, England's Michelangelo, is tender and affecting; very much the masterpiece for an elderly bachelor with a soft centre. Bought a decade after his daughters had deserted him, this picture of a dreamy youth may have had much the same appeal to Winthrop as earlier it had had to the art master at Eton.

Among the trifles two things are outstanding: Prud'hon's study of a male nude and Sargent's of a breakfast table. The latter is sublime, the room expertly defined only with tone and soft-edged plane and not a hard line to be seen, light flickering on silver, light brilliant on the white foreground of the table cloth. Very little else gives such intense pleasure. How could Winthrop buy such drab drawings by Seurat when others so much better were readily available?

How could a man with even the remotest claim to connoisseurship bear to have in his house a painting of flowers as blowsy and vulgar as a barmaid (but much less fun), even if it is by Renoir?

There are things in this exhibition worth a second glance - Roman paintings by Gericault, ballet dancers by Degas, a strangely unbeguiling self-portrait by young Felix Braquemond, precocious at the age of 20, Moreau's little painting of Salome haunted by the Baptist's head, two watercolours by Winslow Homer painted in 1880 with the startling simplicity of Nolde decades later - but all in all, this collection is a disappointment, at best a filler of odd gaps, at worst unexciting because familiar and slightly second-rate.