Part 4

When he came into the Convention hall three days later he was denounced by André Dumont and obliged to defend himself. He probably believed the end had come. He was no orator, and his defect of speech made things still harder for him. He stood there, pale and fearful, and it is said a nervous perspiration so dewed his forehead that it dripped down his coat to the floor. Where now was the courage with which he had offered to die with Robespierre; with which when Marat was attacked in the Convention he had once exclaimed: “Kill me in his place!” Yes, it was undoubtedly easier to make drawings of one’s enemies and former friends on their road to the guillotine than to defend one’s life before a tribunal of the people. He made so pitiful an impression that they let him go. Two days later, however, it was thought wiser to arrest him. At first his sentence was light and he was allowed to work, but soon, after another stormy session of the Convention, he was transferred to the Luxembourg. His imprisonment lasted five months. Toward the end, conditions were again made easier and he was allowed to work. Then he was set free, and again, this time at the instigation of his fellow artists, imprisoned for months. Finally during the general amnesty at the end of the year 1795 he again obtained his freedom. This was the end of his political activities. The terrible months of uncertainty during his imprisonment, when death so often stared him in the face, must have been a time of spiritual growth for him, for they resulted in his painting a marvellous series of portraits. His achievement at this time, and during the following years when the revolution slowly ebbed, is the greatest of his artistic career.

[Illustration: FIG. 23. WOMAN OF THE REVOLUTION (1795)

_Museum, Lyon_]

[Illustration: FIG. 24. NAPOLEON AS FIRST CONSUL (1797)

_Private Possession, Paris_]

There is first of all a portrait depicting the artist at the period of his imprisonment (Fig. 22). It is seldom that a self portrait expresses so vividly the perplexities of a period of terror as do the haunted eyes of this young fanatic. These eyes have been called evil, and David himself described as a good artist but an evil man. The moral equipment of the revolutionaries cannot be summarized in such simple fashion, however. David’s political opponents hit nearer the mark when they called him to the defence of Marat, “What does that prove so far as Marat is concerned? Only the devotion of an honorable man who is allowing himself to be carried away by excitement.” That David’s political life was so passionate, may be due in part to the youthful violence of his friends. Nearly all the revolutionary leaders were in their early thirties, an age which is apt to be the stormy period of a man’s life. Old people do not bring about revolutions. David, to be sure, was forty at the time of its outbreak, but see how youthful he still looked; and the unspent store of his strength is proved by the great age to which he lived.

He painted another important work during his imprisonment--a little landscape of the Luxembourg Gardens as seen from his window (now in the Louvre), one of the first modern realistic landscapes which seem to foreshadow Courbet’s efforts. The eighteenth-century conception of landscape was very different. The landscapes were like theatrical scenery, built up with carefully divided “wings.” Here, for the first time, a French artist dared to paint an unpromising bit of earth exactly as he saw it, with all nature’s accidental qualities. A garden fence in the middle runs diagonally across the picture, while over in one corner is an avenue of trees which should conventionally have been in the center of the canvas--no planned symmetrical construction, no coulisses in the foreground. Here, too, was a break with tradition--a new beginning.

The two portraits of Monsieur and Madame Seriziat (Figs. 18 and 19), painted by David while he was still under arrest, are particularly illuminating as regards his personality. How could an artist, above whose head the sword of Damocles still hung, paint such sunny and optimistic portraits? We would, in fact, appreciate only one side of David if we think of him always as the stern Roman, never as the light-hearted Frenchman. From the beginning to the end of his artistic career, side by side with his classic compositions and his moving revolutionary portrayals (Fig. 23), he painted a series of charming portraits which prove that through all the horrors of the revolution he never lost his Gallic light-heartedness or his feeling for grace. At the beginning of the series stands the pleasing portrait of Vigée LeBrun, painted in 1793, and at the end, the famous portrait of Madame Recamier painted in 1800. In these works there is still an echo of eighteenth century elegance, a trace of that esprit and glamour which always distinguishes the best of French art. Yet the forms, the simple outlines, the wide empty spaces of the background and the flatness of the treatment is wholly new. And besides in these portraits we find for the first time representations of the Bourgeoisie which replace those of the aristocracy of the eighteenth century and whose best types became henceforth the patrons of art which in former days the courts had been.

[Illustration: FIG. 25. PORTRAIT OF VIGÉE LEBRUN (1793)

_Museum, Rouen_]

[Illustration: FIG. 26. MADAME RECAMIER (1800)

_Louvre, Paris_]

[Illustration: FIG. 27. INGRES AS A BOY (_c._ 1795)

_Private Collection, Paris_]

Scarcely a year had passed since David’s escape from prison when his freedom was again endangered by the royalist youth who believed that the moment of reaction had arrived. But now there appeared in his studio one day--this was at the end of 1796--an officer sent by General Bonaparte who asked in his name whether he would accept an offer of safety with his army in Italy. It is evidence of the extraordinary farsightedness of Napoleon that his feelers extended everywhere--wherever there might be future support for his power. But David did not accept the offer: not that he had not at once recognized in Bonaparte his coming greatness--in fact he already called him his “hero”--for David’s instinct was in this respect just as unerring as was Bonaparte’s--but that he had most likely promised himself, as a result of the terrible experience of the last years, to no longer become embroiled in political affairs. Napoleon’s political position was at this time not yet assured, he did not give up the idea of tempting our artist. When he returned from Italy he called at his studio for the first time and wished to be painted. His restless spirit, however, could endure only one sitting. The wonderful sketch which resulted (Fig. 24) is still in existence and proves that Bonaparte knew what he was about when he desired David to become the blazoner of his coming power. No artist has given us from the very beginning so idealized a conception of his personality. The breadth of the design in this unfinished composition; the noble verve of the position; the dauntlessness of expression: everything was in keeping with the great historical style that Napoleon himself might have dreamed of. A few weeks later David received an invitation from Napoleon to accompany him on his Egyptian campaign. Again the artist refused although he had already entirely succumbed to the personality of the great general. When Napoleon returned from Egypt he visited David frequently and flattered him by taking him around Paris and talking over with him his plans for beautifying the city. At the end David fell completely under the influence of the stronger personality, as had happened before in the case of Marat and Robespierre. And in the same degree that Napoleon’s personality was more powerful than that of the revolutionaries, his influence was the more crushing. Only in this way can we account for the fact that the one-time revolutionary-champion of democratic ideals became at the end the court painter of the emperor. But this was not to the advantage of David’s art. So long as Napoleon had not yet reached the height of his power--that is until about 1800--our artist succeeded in producing several imposing compositions in honor of the First Consul, especially the famous portrait on horseback, where he is shown ascending the Alps, symbolically representing his rise to the highest heights of glory--certainly an extraordinary translation of a still living and even young personage into the realm of the ideal and of history. But when Napoleon had become emperor and David his none too carefully treated servant, his art became weaker and weaker from year to year, the while his compositions grew larger in size. When after the downfall of the emperor and the return of the Bourbons he left France in exile and settled in Brussels, where he lived until the year 1824, he still attracted the attention of the world through his many pupils and admirers, though his art now belonged to the past.

David belongs with the few artists who are mentioned not only in the history of art but also in political history--perhaps a doubtful advantage, for preoccupation with two so conflicting fields as art and politics, was only possible through the sacrifice of one or the other. Indeed David as politician lived only in the shadow of the greater ones. In the field of art he was at his best when his political ideas did not tempt him too much toward abstract themes--that is to say, in portraiture, when he had the model before him. As a human being his forte lay in a highly sensitive response to the most intense intellectual and emotional currents of his time. Since, during the greater part of his lifetime, these currents were not primarily of an artistic nature, his art could not always take advantage of them.

This too intense interest in the great events of the day was perhaps his weak point: the fact that he submitted too easily to the ephemeral demands of his contemporaries, preferring the fortune of a successful present to the glory which the future reserves only for the highest aims and the complete renunciation of the demands of the day. From his earliest years David had the critics on his side, and the steady stream of admirers that had gathered about him showed no decrease, remaining with him even in the most dangerous periods of his life. How different did it fare with one of his really great contemporaries--Beethoven--who throughout his life had to contend with uncomprehending critics, but who is quoted as having said in this connection, “Damn me as much as you like; you are not able to damn me into eternity.” Just as to the great ones is given as a recompense for the misunderstanding of their day the consciousness of their own value to the future, so the artist who is glorified in his own time knows his own limitations. David said himself that many of his own works such as the Brutus no longer had a living value. It was his bad fortune that he was in too close contact with the affairs of the revolution, for the greatest art (we return here to our introductory remarks) cannot arise in the midst of bloodshed. There can be no doubt of where the unattached and eternal art lay during David’s period, when we call to mind the poetry of Goethe or the music of Beethoven. The centers where the greatest poet and the greatest musician of the days of the revolution lived--Weimar and Vienna--were far removed from the theater of the struggle, just as Rembrandt’s art flowered outside the scene of the Thirty Years War. From a distance the deafening war clangor permeated into the quiet worlds of these rulers in the realm of art; from a distance through transfiguring light appeared to them the new ideas for which the struggle was waged. Such should be the milieu where the greatest art is born--impregnated with the shower of the newly created ideas, but quietly and not to such a degree that its own existence is imperilled.

This chance for perspective also makes it possible for the really great artist to judge worldly matters more clearly than the one who lives in the midst of the fray. How much more impartially, for instance, did Beethoven, who otherwise did not care for politics, judge the events of the times than David, who worried about them half his lifetime! Beethoven, also, like the best of his contemporaries, was democratically inclined and applauded the new revolutionary ideas. When Napoleon became First Consul he recognized his greatness and desired to celebrate in his music the hero who had brought the revolution to completion. He began his great symphony, the “Eroica,” and wrote upon the title page the name of Bonaparte next to his own. When the news was brought to him that Napoleon had crowned himself emperor, indignant that his illusions had been dispelled and that Bonaparte had become as tyrannical as the crowned heads which the revolution had deposed, he tore up the dedication and began the symphony anew, ending it with the funeral march.

The fascination of the art and the personality of David lies in the fact that they reflect the period of the greatest intellectual and social upheaval of his nation--an upheaval such as comes to every nation once in its history, with such a force that through it the whole world is shaken. In such moments of history creations of centuries collapse at one blow. The foundations of faith and of morals waver; the ties of family and friendship are torn apart and even the customary tasks of the day, under other circumstances serving as an anchor alike to the weak and the strong, appear useless and cease: like the flood of the terrific storm which engulfs us, rudely tearing away from the strongest the guiding of their own fate, and forcing the slothful into the maelstrom of the higher general will. What remains for the individual who, hesitating, stands at the edge of the precipice, viewing the tragic drama? Can he do better than to plunge into the stream, keeping afloat as best he may?

Happy the one who in such periods succeeds like our artist in preserving so much of his own identity that from out the history of this chaos his name still rings with vibrant life.

ONE HUNDRED AND SIXTY COPIES PRIVATELY PRINTED FOR FREDERIC FAIRCHILD SHERMAN MCMXXIX

FOOTNOTES

[1] The picture is not dated, but since the portrait of Madame de Verninac which is almost identical in composition is dated 1799, it is most likely executed shortly thereafter.

[2] The figure studies in this sketchbook are interesting from another point of view (compare Fig. 10, a study of a beggar closely related to the composition of the Belisarius, although later in date). They prove clearly the endeavour of David to replace by his own the eighteenth-century style of drawing as he had learned it in the Boucher school. Instead of modelling the figures through diagonal parallel lines, indicating the shadows and neglecting the outlines, he tries to produce the effect of plasticity through clearly connected outlines alone, leaving out the modelling entirely. In this respect also David is the predecessor of artists of the most modern school. He developed his style of drawing in connection with his studies after Roman sculptures and was strongly influenced in his method of designing by a young French sculptor, Lamarie, whom he met in Rome. (See Charles Saunier: _Louis David_, p. 16.)

[3] Illustrated in the excellent biography of David by Léon Rosenthal in the series: _Les Maitres de l’Art_, p. 30.

[4] _Briefe aus der französischen Revolution_, edited by G. Landauer, 1922.

[5] Reproduced in Charles Saunier, _David_, p. 44 and 48.

[6] The best book on the subject is by Pierre de Nolhac, _La Reine Marie Antoinette_, Paris.

[7] Reproduced in the book on Danton by Louis Madelin (Paris, 1914). The following pages are based upon this excellent biography.

Transcriber’s Notes

Punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling were made consistent when a predominant preference was found in the original book; otherwise they were not changed.

Simple typographical errors were corrected; unbalanced quotation marks were remedied when the change was obvious, and otherwise left unbalanced.

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