An imaging lens consists essentially of six lenses in the following order from the object side: a negative first lens; a positive second lens; a negative third lens; a positive fourth lens; a positive fifth lens; and a negative sixth lens. An aperture stop is disposed more toward the object side than the image-side surface of the fourth lens. Conditional expression (4) is satisfied, where f is the focal length of the entire system, and f56 is the combined focal length of the fifth lens and the sixth lens: f56/f