WASHINGTON, D.C. - For serious connoisseurs of superb art, this summer all roads lead to Washington; or this fall to New York. The draw is a rare display in which one can see, within a single artist exhibition, several of the most extraordinary portraits of all time.

the show is "Portraits by Ingres: Image of an Epoch," organized by the National Gallery in London (where it was seen earlier this year), the National Gallery of Art in Washington (where it is on view through August 22), and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (where it will be shown from October 5-January 2, 2000).

With 40 portrait paintings and 60 drawings, it is the first exhibition to examine Ingres' likenesses in the two media and the most comprehensive presentation of his portraits ever seen in America. A big hit in London, the display is causing a well-deserved stir in this country as well.

The vivid oil and sharply focused pencil likenesses on view, from every period of the artist's long career, effectively demonstrate why he is regarded as one of the greatest portrait painters and, in the words of National Gallery of Art director Earle A. Powell III, "one of the most brilliant draftsmen of all time." Quite an accomplishment for a painter whose ambition was to create historical and allegorical compositions and came to consider his painted likenesses a chore and a "considerable waste of time."

Driven by an "insatiable desire for glory," Ingres insisted he wanted to spend his time on grander themes - mythologies, harem scenes, Bible narratives and history subjects - and turned out numerous epic works in pursuit of that ambition. Well known to art lovers, they are not in sight in this show, which focuses solely on his marvelous portrait oeuvre.

For more than six decades, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780-1867) painted with unsurpassed precision and intensity some of the most powerful, creative and wealthy figures of France. A virtuoso technician, his gift for innovative composition and insightful poses and his unrivaled ability to record dazzling clothes, jewelry and hair styles, made him one of the most sought after portraitists of his day. His male likenesses are imposing, but even more stunning are his renditions of females garbed in all the delicious excess of Nineteenth Century fashion. No one has ever painted clothing better than Ingres.

The sheer artistry of his likenesses makes it clear why admiration for Ingres' work has continued unabated, inspiring such gifted painters as Matisse, Picasso and especially Degas.

This last of the great French classicist painters was born in the south of France, son of a minor artist. He received artistic training from his father; at an academy in Toulouse; and finally in the Paris studio of neoclassical titan Jacques-Louis David. Ingres' earliest portraits, painted while he was a student in Paris, are of family and friends. Freely brushed and intimate, they constitute exercises in developing the young artist's repertoire for more ambitious projects to come.

Two quite different likeness of Napoleon Bonaparte - "First Consul" (1804) and as "Emperor of France" (1806) - represent Ingres' breakthroughs to official government commissions. They reflect the meticulous realism and high degree of idealization that was to characterize the rest of his career.

His enormous (roughly 7Ť by 5 feet) depiction of the First Consul, sponsored by the Minister of Interior to commemorate Bonaparte's visit to Liege and placed in Town Hall there, shows the young statesman pointing to a decree calling for reconstruction of a portion of the city, glimpsed through the window on the right.

The recipient of the prestigious Prix de Rome, Ingres departed in 1806 for an anticipated four year sojourn in the Eternal City that extended to 14 years. At the outset of his stay in the French occupied city he experimented with paintings of beautiful and coolly sensuous nudes, embodying concepts that later found their way into his female portraits.

Ingres' infatuation with the work of Raphael, the great painter of the high Renaissance, infused these works and those of the rest of his career. As his most acute critic, poet Charles Baudelaire later observed, "Passionate lover of antiquity and its model, respectful servant of nature, he (Ingres) made portraits that rival Roman sculptures."

Two contrasting likenesses are high points of these early Roman years: the rather rigid, formal treatment of high ranking French government bureaucrat, "Charles-Marie-Jean-Baptiste Marcotte (Marcotte d'Argenteuil)" (1810) and the romantic view of Ingres' painter-friend "Francois-Marius Granet" (1809), whose melancholy temperament was echoed by silhouetting his head against the Roman skyline under storm clouds.

After his term at the French Academy ended in 1810, Ingres stayed on in Rome for a decade, in part because he was not yet sure he could succeed in Paris and in part because he found ready patronage for his portraits of French occupation officials.

His first great sensuous yet detached female portrait, "Madame de Seonnes, nee Marie-Genevieve-Marguerite Marcoz, later Vicom-tesse de Senonnes" of 1814, captured the languorous elegance of the beautiful, sumptuously-garbed, heavily bejewelled divorce, who had scandalized the Eternal City by taking up with the Vicomte de Sennones. Her cool, alluring glance and the mirrored reflection of her back are so compelling that one hardly notices that the ovoid of her face seems too perfect and that her extended right arm appears many inches longer than her crooked left arm.

Actually, the artist deliberately lengthened the arms of women sitters in order to emphasize their sinuous looks and their elegant sleeves, and elongated their necks to add expressiveness. Although these anatomical distortions were employed in the cause of creating idealized images and capturing the provocative allure of his aristocratic women, they were often mocked by contemporary reviewers.

With so many sumptuous paintings on view, it is easy to overlook the exquisite craftsmanship of the 60 Ingres drawings that are displayed throughout the exhibition. From the outset he regarded drawing as crucial to achieving a purity of line and form without the decorative distortion of color, and throughout his life he drew portraits remarkable for their elegant, unforced poses and incisive precision.

Ingres' line was unerring, it seems. We are told that his immaculate pencil likenesses took only four hours to complete. His self portrait of 1822 is one of those on view that suggest why these delicate little masterpieces are among the most refined and expert drawings anywhere. They are worth close study.

Ingres' production of portrait drawings increased after the collapse of Napoleon's empire in 1815, when he eked out a living for a time depicting British and other foreign visitors to the Eternal City who flooded in with the establishment of peace.

Leaving Rome in 1820, Ingres spent four years in Florence, where he immersed himself in the study of Renaissance painting, especially the art of his hero, Raphael, whom he sought to emulate in monumental religious paintings. Hoping to succeed as a history painter, he devoted most of these four years to project in that field.

In 1824 Ingres returned to Paris from his first long stay in Italy. By that time his huge altar piece for his home town, Montauban, was an enormous critical success. He was promptly hailed as the leading artist of the neoclassical school, which adhered to the ideal of classical perfection and the primacy of drawing, in contrast to the expression of emotions through color advocated by Eugene Delacroix and the rising romantic movement. France's art establishment showered Ingres with honors and important commissions, and he did few portraits during the next few years.

A notable exception, and the highlight of the entire show, is his riveting likeness of Paris newspaper magnate Louis-Francois Bertin (1832), generally regarded as one of the great portraits in the history of western art. As preliminary drawings on view demonstrate, the artist had great trouble deciding how to pose the powerful publisher. He eventually adopted a strikingly expressive posture in which Bertin appears about to rise from his chair to confront the viewer.

Startlingly immediate and unrelentingly natural, this painting became an icon of the triumphant French middle class, a symbol of the economic and political ascendancy of the bourgeoisie in the first half of the Nineteenth Century. Later called the "Buddha of the bourgeoisie" by painter Edouard Manet, Bertin is a likeness viewers over a century and a half after its completion will not soon forget. Appropriately, it is owned by the great French national museum, the Louvre, in Paris.

At the height of his fame, Ingres returned to Rome in 1835, spending six years as director of the French Academy, which put him in a position to influence the next generation of painters. This task took so much of his time that he did not complete a single portrait during his tenure. He did, however, execute a number of empathetic portrait drawings, notably of fellow musicians - Ingres was an accomplished violinist - including Charles Gounod, Franz Liszt and Niccolo Paganini.

Although he proclaimed on his return in 1841 that "It is not to paint portraits that I came back to Paris," Ingres could not decline the commission to create the official likeness of the Duc d'Orleans, heir to the French throne, whom he presented as an erect, haughty, self-possessed aristocrat against a subtly elegant background. When the prince was killed in a carriage accident a few months after the portrait was completed in 1842, the King ordered Ingres and his students to paint numerous replicas. It became Ingres' best-known image during his lifetime.

Financially secure during the final quarter century of his life, Ingres turned down many portrait requests, choosing to paint only sitters whose beauty or personality appealed to him. He was particularly attracted by opportunities to depict young women of charm and breeding.

His delicious painting of the vivacious and flirtatious "Vicomtesse Othenin d'Haussonville" (1845) is a rare loan from the Frick Collection in New York. The 27 year old beauty, depicted in a sitting room of her Paris home, had apparently just attended or was about to attend the opera. Her opera glasses are on the opulent mantel, her evening bag hangs from the handle of a vase and her cashmere shawl in thrown on a chair.

The saucy countess's pose, head tilted and index finger placed coyly at her jaw, suggests her admitted "taste for society, for flirtation, and for pleasure." The enigmatic charm of this image rests not only on the elusive gaze of the subject, but on the exquisite realism in the depiction of the sheen of her satin dress and the still life objects behind her, combined with the precise handling of her arms, neck and head - and their reflection in the mirror. As a family friend perceptively observed to the countess, "Monsieur Ingres must be in love with you to have painted you that way." The painter was then 65.

Suitably famous among Ingres' late portraits are two versions of "Madame Paul-Sigisbert Moitessier," one standing and one sitting, painted over a period of 12 years from 1844 and 1856. Married to a wealthy man twice her age who made a fortune importing Cuban cigars, the subject was shown in the first completed canvas standing, wearing a handsome black ball gown, adorned with numerous jewels and pink flowers in her hair, and fixing the viewer with an imperious gaze.

Ingres had a much more difficult time finishing the lady's seated portrait, as numerous preparatory drawings show. The completed likeness is nothing short of spectacular.

Making her arms more slender in response to complaints they looked too plump in the standing version, Ingres presented Madame Moitessier in an opulent silk dress, bursting with bouquets of roses, rendered in colorful, meticulously precise detail. Her pose, inspired by that of a goddess in a Roman fresco, accentuated her voluptuousness and the elegance of her clothes, which represented the height of Second Empire fashion.

Reflections of two aspects of Second Empire high society - ultra serious and overly ostentatious - these two portraits are fitting climaxes to the career of a painter who secured his place in art history by creating images remarkable for their detailed recording of people and fashion and timeless in their unparalleled pictorial perfection.

When Ingres completed his last likeness, a self portrait, in 1865, the 85 year old artist could look back on a six decade career that spanned the closing years of the French Revolutionary era, the First Empire of Napoleon Bonaparte, the Bourbon Restoration, and the Second Empire. Painting many of the most important and affluent figures of his time in piercingly exact portraits that convey a vivid picture of the society and luxurious fashions of the day, Ingres created "the most faithful image of an epoch" and much more.

The exhibition is accompanied by a mammoth, 596 page catalogue, profusely illustrated and crammed with informative essays that do justice to Ingres' art. Edited by the Met's Gary Tinterow and the National Gallery's Philip Conisbee, two of the exhibition curators, this will be the standard Ingres text for years to come.

The National Gallery of Art, Fourth Street at Constitution Avenue, N.W., is open Monday through Saturday, 10 am to 5 pm and Sunday, 11 am to 6 pm. Admission is free. Telephone 202/737-4215.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Fifth Avenue at 82nd Street, is open Tuesday through Thursday and Sunday, 9:30 am to 5:15 pm, Friday and Saturday, 9:30 am to 9 pm. Telephone 212/879-5500.