Part 1
Transcriber’s Note: Italics are enclosed in _underscores_. Additional notes will be found near the end of this ebook.
[Illustration: MLLE. CHARLOTTE DU VAL D’OGNES
_The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York_]
JACQUES LOUIS DAVID AND THE FRENCH REVOLUTION
BY W. R. VALENTINER
[Illustration]
NEW YORK FREDERIC FAIRCHILD SHERMAN MCMXXIX
Copyright, 1929, by Frederic F. Sherman
TO ELEANOR AND EDSEL B. FORD
ILLUSTRATIONS
MLLE. CHARLOTTE DU VAL D’OGNES Frontispiece
FIG. 1 MADAME DE SERVAN (1799) 3
FIG. 2 H. RIGAUD: GENTLEMAN PLAYING A BAGPIPE 3
FIG. 3 F. BOUCHER: MADAME DE POMPADOUR 3
FIG. 4 MINERVA’S CONQUEST OF MARS (1771) 4
FIG. 5 THE BLIND BELISARIUS (1781) 8
FIG. 6 THE OATH OF THE HORATII (1784) 8
FIG. 7 VILLAGE OUTSIDE ROME (1788) 8
FIG. 8 VIEW IN ROME (1788) 8
FIG. 9 PEN SKETCH OF MARIE ANTOINETTE (1793) _Made from the artist’s window as the tumbril halted on the way to the scaffold_ 14
FIG. 10 STUDY FROM THE ITALIAN SKETCHBOOK (1788) 14
FIG. 11 MICHEL GÉRARD AND HIS FAMILY (1789) 18
FIG. 12 PORTRAIT OF BARÊRE (1793) 22
FIG. 13 LAVOISIER AND HIS WIFE (1787) 26
FIG. 14 MME. DE RICHMOND AND HER SON (_c._ 1800) 26
FIG. 15 LE PELLETIER (1793) _From engraving in the Louvre_ 26
FIG. 16 MARAT (1793) 26
FIG. 17 DANTON (1799) _From drawing in the Museum, Lille_ 26
FIG. 18 MADAME SERIZIAT AND SON (1795) 32
FIG. 19 MONSIEUR SERIZIAT (1795) 32
FIG. 20 MARAT (1793) 38
FIG. 21 ST. JUST (1792) 44
FIG. 22 SELF PORTRAIT 44
FIG. 23 WOMAN OF THE REVOLUTION (1795) 51
FIG. 24 NAPOLEON AS FIRST CONSUL (1797) 51
FIG. 25 PORTRAIT OF VIGÉE LEBRUN (1793) 54
FIG. 26 MADAME RECAMIER (1800) 54
FIG. 27 INGRES AS A BOY (1795) 54
[Illustration: FIG. 2. H. RIGAUD: GENTLEMAN PLAYING A BAGPIPE
_Museum, Aix_]
[Illustration: FIG. 1. L. DAVID: MADAME DE SERVAN (1799)
_Private Possession, New York_]
[Illustration: FIG. 3. F. BOUCHER: MADAME DE POMPADOUR
_Collection of Maurice de Rothschild, Paris_]
JACQUES LOUIS DAVID
AND THE FRENCH REVOLUTION
❦
Is it possible that a period like the French Revolution and the era of Napoleon’s tyrannous rule should witness the development of a great art? It would seem that in the domain of art fresh creative impulses are born more often in times of unrest and disturbance than in periods of political security. Those epochs in the history of art which we regard today as “golden ages”--the age of Pericles; the Renaissance at about 1500; the Holland of the day of Frans Hals and Rembrandt--were by no means peaceful years, but periods of national strife and revolutionary ideas. No happy alliance is possible between political discipline and art which springs from the free, untrammeled impulse of the individual. We need only walk through those galleries at Fontainebleau arranged by Napoleon during the days of his Empire to recognize the deadening influence exerted by an established autocracy, and feel blow coldly over us the chilly breath of an academic and court-inspired art.
On the contrary, the period of the French Revolution, and the days of Napoleon’s struggle to power, which coincided with the period of David’s finest achievement, witnessed so powerful an onrush of new ideas that their influence persists till the present day. Modern art had its inception in this period, and today, after a lapse of over a hundred years, is again tending in the direction first indicated by David. It is herein that the significance of his contribution lies. Helped by the influences of the revolution, he destroyed the artificial, hyper-refined art ideals of the eighteenth century, and substituted for them a sterner, simpler, more healthy and democratic art. That is not to affirm that his art was greater than the one it superseded. David was not a genius of the highest order as was Watteau, but to those of us sensitive to the forces underlying our own times, it says--or should say--more than pre-revolutionary art.
We need only to compare a portrait of David’s style like the one of Madame de Servan (Fig. 1) with portraits of his predecessors (Figs. 2 and 3) in order to recognize the difference between the Rococo period and the new era, introduced by David. This portrait of Madame de Servan, painted about 1800,[1] impresses one as a composition of statuesque simplicity expressing the salient spirit of a period which was seeking fundamentally new doctrines by which to govern life. The portrait by Rigaud, the famous court painter of the reign of Louis XIV, painted in the beginning of the century, and of Boucher’s portrait of Madame de Pompadour, painted in 1758, do not differ too much from another in style. In these portraits of the Rococo period the surface is filled with a restless play of short-curving lines; light and shadow are alternated perpetually at close intervals; the colors form a pleasing pattern of small variegated patches, and the costume and accessories almost eclipse the real motif--that of portraiture. In David’s canvas the figure emerges clearly from a wide and empty space, and a clear, flowing line with definite horizontals and verticals has replaced the tortuous curves. It seems an extraordinary piece of daring for the artist to have composed in these broad planes with a completely empty background, when we consider the century-old tradition embodied in the older paintings. It was the French Revolution, with its rejection of old formulas which inspired this daring.
But just as the revolution, from prelude to aftermath, covered a span of some twenty years, so the artist required a similar period of time to gradually attain the classic style which we see here stamped with the authority of his fifty years.
Jacques Louis David was born in 1748 in the middle of the Louis XV period, and the school which fathered him was that of Boucher, the frank exponent of the playful and elegant school of painting fostered by the artificial social life of Paris. David’s earliest known composition, “Minerva’s Conquest of Mars,” painted in 1771 in the artist’s twenty-third year, and now in the Louvre (Fig. 4), shows Boucher’s influence clearly. Here we still have the unquiet baroque line of pre-revolutionary painting--the picture is full of detail, the draperies worn by the figures flutter in the breeze like those of Boucher and the cherubs beloved of this master float in the clouds. The subject, too, is of the mythologic-allegorical character affected by the painters of the court and the aristocracy. The Goddess of Wisdom conquers the God of War! What irony when we remember that twenty years later during the revolution the painter of this picture was among those who helped let loose on France a war of twenty years’ duration.
[Illustration: FIG. 4. MINERVA’S CONQUEST OF MARS (1771)
_Louvre, Paris_]
If we look more closely we can discern an alien spirit behind the apparently suave portrayal. Despite his subject the young artist’s combative vein emerges. True, Mars is overthrown, but with what ill grace he accepts his fate. It might be Danton himself, the great revolutionary, overthrown by his enemies. A face expressing such fury of despair, so spasmodically clenched a hand was never portrayed by any of the playful Rococo painters, and can we not discern something of the energetic Napoleonic spirit in Minerva’s conquering pose?
David must have been of a naturally passionate and excitable temperament--possibly inherited from his father who was killed in a duel when the boy was eleven years old. As a young artist he applied for the Prix de Rome, and when he did not at once receive it from the Academy, was about to take his life in despair and was only persuaded by a friend to abandon the idea of starving himself to death after three days of fasting with that purpose in view. Later on, in extenuation of this episode, he said: “This postponement of my journey to Italy was prejudicial to my development, as I was four years too late in abandoning the bad style of the French painters.” Like all reformers he believed that everything produced by the generation preceding him was bad, although today all that we can say is that it was different!
When, in 1775, he did actually set out for Rome, and his friends at parting advised him to beware the influence of the antique, he replied proudly, “Antique art cannot seduce me--it lacks fire and passion.” Before long, however, he was in thrall to the classic art of Italy, and within a few years his art had undergone a complete transformation, not only in form but in subject. One of the first pictures that he sent from Italy in 1781 to be exhibited in Paris was “The Blind Belisarius,” now in the Museum at Lille (a later version, painted in 1784, in the Louvre) (Fig. 5). Belisarius, once an all-powerful general of the Roman Emperor Justinian, crouches, old, blind and poor by the side of the road. The saviour of Rome and conqueror of Carthage has fallen into disgrace with a master jealous of his fame, and is reduced to beggary. A rich Roman lady, with tears in her eyes, is placing alms in the old man’s helmet held out by a youth, while a passing soldier recognizes his old commander with surprise and pain. Our artist has turned his back on the cheerful Olympian themes of the allegoric-mythological school, and with this tragic subject descends to that world of sorrow and misery in which, but a few years later, he was to see his own nation engulfed. He is still preoccupied, however, with classic themes seen through the eyes of that antiquity in which he had submerged himself. He has not yet completely achieved his individual style, and Boucher’s influence is superseded by that of another French painter who represented the classic style one hundred years earlier--Poussin.
This influence lasted throughout his Italian period. Even as late as 1788 we are constantly reminded in his landscape studies of Nicolas Poussin and Claude Lorrain, as may be exemplified by the two pages from an hitherto unpublished Italian sketchbook dated 1788, reproducing views from the surroundings of Rome (Figs. 7 and 8).[2]
[Illustration: FIG. 5. THE BLIND BELISARIUS (1781)
_Museum, Lille_]
[Illustration: FIG. 6. THE OATH OF THE HORATII (1784)
_Louvre, Paris_]
Just as the poets and orators of the revolution harked back to the classic trend of the seventeenth century--as Voltaire and even Robespierre evoked Racine and Corneille--David, too, now followed a trend of French art which has persisted from medieval times to the present day, that line of classic, simple, antiquely conceived, clearly constructed creations from which the highly developed church sculptures of the middle ages, the Renaissance paintings of the period of Francis I, and the art of Claude Lorrain and Poussin derive. Simplicity and straight lines replaced the restless, complicated curve in the composition of the Belisarius. It is not alone in the architecture, strongly influenced by the antique, that the horizontal and vertical line multiplied itself, the painter, too, sought to lend strength and rhythm to his composition by a parallelism in the gestures of his figures. The arms of Belisarius and the boy follow the same line, as do their feet, and the soldier’s hands repeat the parallel gesture.
[Illustration: FIG. 7. VILLAGE OUTSIDE ROME
From the Italian sketchbook (1788)
_Private possession, Detroit_]
[Illustration: FIG. 8. VIEW IN ROME
From the Italian sketchbook (1788)
_Private possession, Detroit_]
David achieved this linear coördination between figures and architecture with even greater success in his next important work, “The Oath of the Horatii,” painted in 1783 and now in the Louvre (Fig. 6). The figures, divided into three groups, are posed in masterly fashion against the three arches of the architectural background--three men on the left, three female figures on the right, and the old man, holding out the three swords in the centre. The movement swings from group to group with the same rhythm that governs the curves of the arches, and is strongly emphasized by the parallel lines of limbs and draperies. We are told that the outstretched foot of the foremost youth was drawn and redrawn by David many times. It is now in exactly the right stance to determine the general linear movement and is at the same time a masterpiece of naturalistic drawing. The pose of this youth’s spear has been criticised as practically impossible, but it requires precisely this continuous line to strengthen the rhythm of the outstretched legs.
The motif is again drawn from Roman history, this time via a drama by Corneille with which David was familiar. The three sons of the old Horace, who occupies the centre of the canvas, were chosen by the Romans to meet the Albans in single combat, the latter being also represented by three brothers, the Curiatii. It had been agreed that this combat should decide which race would have dominion over the other. The victory fell to the Horatii, the representatives of Rome. Two of the brothers fell in combat with the Curiatii, but the third triumphed through a ruse--turning apparently in flight and killing his three opponents one after another as they pursued him.
The trumpet call to freedom implicit in this composition must have rung in the ears of the youthful French patriots who crowded to see it, for it appeared at a moment when the soul of young France had been stirred by the American war of independence. It was painted in the year 1783 when Benjamin Franklin signed in Paris that treaty with England in which, for the first time, the independence of the American Union was recognized. Beyond the Atlantic there had come into existence a republic comparable to the Roman republic, an anti-monarchical conception whose ideals were sympathetic to the progressive thinkers of France, though France was, at the same time, the seat of Europe’s oldest and most absolute monarchy. How did this message of freedom from across the ocean affect the youth of France? Our artist’s ear was sensitively attuned to the ferment of radical thought. While the painters of the older school, Boucher and Fragonard, still painted their playful compositions and tried to dissemble the tragic reality, the dull rumble of the coming earthquake sounded its note in David’s paintings. His themes became ever more gruesome and inflammatory. A painting in Marseilles depicts St. Roche pleading with the Madonna to succor the sick, and the foreground is filled with dead, plague-stricken bodies. Another in Valence represents the Death of Ugolino with his Sons--that horrible scene from Dante’s _Divina Commedia_ in which the Italian general and his five sons die of hunger in a dungeon into which they have been thrown by his political enemies.
[Illustration: FIG. 9. PEN SKETCH OF MARIE ANTOINETTE
Made from the artist’s window as the tumbril halted on the way to the scaffold (1793)
_Collection of Edmond de Rothschild, Paris_]
[Illustration: FIG. 10. STUDY FROM THE ITALIAN SKETCHBOOK (1788)]
“The Death of Socrates,”[3] painted in 1787, now in private possession in Paris, enhanced David’s rapidly growing celebrity not only in France, but abroad. No less a personage than Sir Joshua Reynolds, who was then in Paris, said that he had studied the picture daily for a week, and with every inspection found it more perfect. It was, he said, “the greatest achievement since Raffael’s frescoes in the Vatican, and would have done honor to the Athenians of the Periclean age.” Today, of course, this estimate seems an exaggeration to us. The composition is assuredly well planned, and admirable in many of its aspects: the youth, who with averted face hands the poisoned cup to Socrates, and the other youth in the background beating his hands against the arch of the doorway. Some of the gestures seem theatrical, however, and individual figures, such as the athletic and uninspired Socrates, look as though they had been derived from a relief. The composition is too studied; it lacks feeling. Why is it that David’s great historical compositions are apt to leave us cold, especially those produced during a period of great spiritual and political turmoil in which his own sympathies were greatly involved? His part in the revolution amply proves the strength of the passions which might have found an outlet in his art. Why was he not the realist to dramatize those struggles like Delacroix who lived fifty years later, when revolution and world-war were over, yet who painted battles of all kinds with the most terrific naturalism. The answer lies in this very fact: Delacroix never witnessed the battle scenes he reproduced; they are the fruit of his imagination. It is impossible for a significant realistic art to develop during war and revolution. What one experiences at such times is so horrible that the imagination is stifled rather than stimulated. Only insensitive and coarse natures are capable of painting scenes of horror through which they have lived. When, and as now in our days, reality weighs all too heavily upon us, art, in self defense, becomes abstract and withdraws itself from reality. It is for this reason that the art of the revolution, David’s art, was stylized and cool: the artist perforce took refuge from the horrors of reality in the kingdom of his imagination. His art, like the poetry and oratory of the day, was idealistic in trend. When Robespierre delivered those terrible speeches that sent so many human beings to the guillotine, he spoke slowly, rhythmically, in artfully rounded phrases, as though he were holding an academic discussion. That the great revolutionaries, among whom we must number David, thought idealistically rather than realistically, is proved conclusively by their manner of expressing themselves. Like all fanatics they lived in a world of dreams and believed their ideas--which seemed to them so splendid--to be either already realized or on the verge of realization. They believed only one last great effort to be necessary, to achieve--though at the cost of human lives--the freedom of humanity as a whole. This alone can explain why revolutionaries who pursued their ends through rivers of blood, seem at times inspired with a noble and unexpected humanitarianism; why they were nearly all tender and devoted men in their private family life. Danton idolized his wife and children, the letters of Camille Desmoulins to his bride are beautiful and touching, and Robespierre, the solitary, the incorruptible, whose private life was beyond criticism, was a great lover of nature, who brought, we are told, bunches of wild flowers home with him from his long walks.
With the portrayal of Brutus (now in the Louvre), who, because of his profound respect for justice permitted the execution of his sons, we find ourselves on the threshold of the revolution. Brutus, with stern, dark countenance, is seated before the Goddess of Justice, while behind him the bodies of his sons are borne across the scene and the grieving mother and sisters cling together in the pillared hall of their dwelling.
While today we feel the construction of this picture to be far too studied, and are inclined to dub it academic, David’s intention was directed precisely against the then accepted traditional formulas. Whoever dreamed, said contemporary criticism, of placing the principal figure in the shadow or planning a composition without regard to the triangular construction? David left the centre of the canvas purposely free. Our eyes fall first on a column, a chair, a still life arrangement on a table, frankly at the expense of the composition’s unity. The incidentals were drawn with extraordinary care. In order to assure the accuracy of the classic furnishings, David had the cabinet maker, Jacob, make the pieces for him after his own designs. The painting created such an extraordinary sensation that not only did it give the first impetus to the Parisian vogue for classic furniture, but women’s fashions were definitely influenced by the loosely coifed hair and long flowing garments of the feminine figures. Not the least significant part of David’s contribution to art is the influence he exerted on the decorative arts and on fashion. It is very rare that the influence of a single artist’s work on a bygone style can be so clearly measured as in the case of David, from whose art the decorative art of the Empire period derived.
Only an artist who is much in the public eye can sway styles, and David became one of the heroes of the day when this composition was exhibited in the Salon of 1789--the year whose autumn was to see the outbreak of the revolution. Perhaps no other picture has ever played so great a rôle in the political and social life of a nation as this work, which is by no means its author’s finest production, much less among the finest of art history. All of which goes to prove how unreliable popular taste is when it comes to a question of contemporary art.
It was of course the subject which evoked such enormous acclaim, for the very name of Brutus was one to conjure with where the radical youth of Paris was concerned. Wherever speeches on the new political conceptions were made there was mention of the name of Rome’s deliverer from the yoke of Caesar, and from Mirabeau to Danton the people loved to connect the name of Brutus with their heroes. Even the opponents of the revolution believed themselves to be inspired by him. When Charlotte Corday murdered David’s friend Marat, she declared in prison that she hoped to meet Brutus in Elysium. This veneration for antiquity, which was characteristic of the revolutionary period, was greatly fostered by David’s classical compositions.
[Illustration: FIG. 11. MICHEL GÉRARD AND HIS FAMILY (1789)
_Museum, Le Mans_]
The narrative of the German writer Halem,[4] who visited Paris the first year of the revolution, and attended some theatrical presentations, tells us vividly how familiar the populace was with David’s painting. He attended a performance of the “Brutus” of Voltaire, at the National Theater, and relates that although he got to the Box Office at five o’clock in the afternoon, he had the utmost difficulty in obtaining a seat. He writes, “Mirabeau stood near me at the ticket office and because of his celebrity was given a place in the fourth balcony. I followed him through the crowd as best I could and managed to get a chair in a rented loge. Mirabeau’s entrance was received with thunderous applause and cries of ‘To the gallery, Mirabeau.’ As he did not respond a deputation waited on him, the spokesman saying, ‘The French nation demands its Brutus.’ He had to give in, and was borne away to be received in the gallery with rapturous applause. What a triumph when later Valerius’ words to Brutus,
‘On you alone all eyes here are turned, ‘You who broke our chains and gave us the gift of freedom,’
were addressed pointedly to him. At the end of the play I was amazed to see David’s painting of Brutus reproduced on the stage. In speaking Brutus’ last words with which the play closes:
‘Rome now is free. That is enough. The gods be thanked,’
Vanhove, the leading actor, assumed the pose of David’s Brutus, and the bodies of his sons were borne across the back of the stage. Every Parisian knows David’s picture. Everyone instantly recognized the intention of publicly honoring the artist through this presentation, and general applause heightened the celebration.” So reads the narrative.