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The most celebrated
French artist of his day and a principal exponent of the late
18th-century
Neoclassical reaction
against the Rococo style.
David won wide acclaim with his huge
canvases on classical themes (e.g., "Oath of the Horatii," 1784.
When the French Revolution began in 1789, he served briefly as its
artistic director and painted its leaders and martyrs ("The Dead Marat,"
1793) in a style that is more realistic than classical. Later he was
appointed painter to Napoleon. Although primarily a painter of
historical events, David was also a great portraitist (e.g.,
"Portrait de Mme Récamier," 1800).
Formative years
David was born in the year when new
excavations at the ash-buried ruins of Pompeii and Herculaneum were beginning to encourage
a stylistic return to antiquity (without being, as was long supposed, a principal cause of
that return). His father, a small but prosperous dealer in textiles, was killed in a duel
in 1757, and the boy was subsequently raised, reportedly not very tenderly, by two uncles.
After classical literary studies and a course in drawing, he was placed in the studio of
Joseph-Marie Vien, a history painter who catered to the growing Greco-Roman taste without
quite abandoning the light sentiment and the eroticism that had been fashionable earlier
in the century. At age 18, the obviously gifted budding artist was enrolled in the school
of the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture. After four failures in the official
competitions and years of discouragement that included an attempt at suicide (by the stoic
method of avoiding food), he finally obtained, in 1774, the Prix de Rome, a government
scholarship that not only provided a stay in Italy but practically guaranteed lucrative
commissions in France. His prize-winning work, "Antiochus and Stratonice,"
reveals that at this point he could still be influenced slightly by the Rococo charm of
the painter François Boucher, who had been a family friend.
In Italy there were many influences, including those of the
dark-toned 17th-century Bolognese school, the serenely classical Nicolas
Poussin, and the dramatically realistic Caravaggio. David absorbed all
three, with an evident preference for the strong light and shade of the
followers of Caravaggio. For a while he seemed determined to fulfill a
prediction he had made on leaving France: "The art of antiquity will not
seduce me, for it lacks liveliness..." But he became interested in the
Neoclassical doctrines that had been developed in Rome by, among others,
the German painter Anton Raphael Mengs and the art historian Johann
Joachim Winckelmann. In the company of Quatremère de Quincy, a young
French sculptor who was a strong partisan of the return to antiquity, he
visited the ruins of Herculaneum, the Doric temples at Paestum, and the
Pompeian collections at Naples. In front of the ancient vases and
columns, he felt, he said later, that he had just been "operated on for
cataract of the eye."
Rise to
fame:
1780-94
Back
in Paris in 1780, he completed and successfully exhibited "Bélisaire demandant
l'aumône" ("Belisarius Asking Alms"), in which he combined a nobly
sentimental approach to antiquity with a pictorial technique reminiscent of Poussin. In
1782 he married the rather plain but spirited Marguerite Pécoul, whose father was a
wealthy building contractor and the superintendent of construction at the Louvre--a
position that carried considerable influence. From this date David prospered rapidly. The
pathos and painterly skill of "Andromache Mourning Hector" brought him election
to the Académie Royale in 1784; and that same year, accompanied this time by his wife and
studio assistants, he returned to Rome with a commission to complete a painting that
appears to have been originally inspired by a Paris performance of Pierre Corneille's
Horace.
The result, finally not based on any of the incidents in the play, was
the
"Oath of the Horatii". The subject is the solemn moment, charged with stoicism
and simple courage, when the three Horatii brothers face their father and offer their
lives to assure victory for Rome in the war with Alba; the pictorial treatment--firm contours,
bare cubic space, sober colour, frieze-like composition, and clear lighting--is as
austerely non-Rococo as the subject. Exhibited first in David's studio in Rome and then,
following his return to France, in the official Paris Salon of 1785, the picture created a
sensation; it was regarded as a manifesto for an artistic revival (the term Neoclassicism
was not yet in use) that would cure Europe of the lingering addiction to dainty curves and
boudoir themes. Eventually, it came to be regarded, although such was almost certainly not
the first intention, as a manifesto for an end to the corruption of an effete aristocracy
and for a return to the stern, patriotic morals attributed to republican Rome.
David became a culture hero; he was even
referred to in some quarters as a messiah. He added to his fame by producing in 1787 the
morally uplifting "Death of Socrates," in 1788 the less uplifting but
archaeologically interesting "Amours de Paris et d'Hélene" ("Paris and
Helen"), and in 1789 another lesson in self-sacrifice
"Les Licteurs rapportent à Brutus les corps de ses fils" ("The Lictors
Bringing to Brutus the Bodies of His Sons"). By the time the "Brutus" was
on view, the French Revolution had begun, and this picture of the patriotic Roman consul
who condemned his traitorous sons to death had an unanticipated political significance. It
also had, through its presumably accurate reconstitution of the details of everyday Roman
life, an effect that was perhaps equally unexpected, for with it David began the long and
extensive influence he was to have on French fashions. Up-to-date homes began to display
imitations of his Roman furniture; men cut their hair short in the Roman style; and women
adopted the dresses and the coiffures of Brutus' daughters. Later on, even the flimsy
Sabine dress, which left the breasts exposed, was adopted by the ultramodern.
In the early years of the Revolution,
David was a member of the extremist Jacobin group led by Robespierre, and he became an
energetic example of the politically committed artist. He was elected to the National
Convention in 1792, in time to vote for the execution of Louis XVI. By 1793, as a member
of the art commission, he was virtually the art dictator of France and was nicknamed
"the Robespierre of the brush." He preached moral and aesthetic sermons to the
Convention:
The artist must be a philosopher. Socrates
the skilled sculptor, Jean-Jacques [Rousseau] the good musician, and the immortal Poussin,
tracing on the canvas the sublime lessons of philosophy, are so many proofs that an
artistic genius should have no other guide except the torch of reason.
Guided supposedly by the torch of reason
and perhaps also by bitter memories of his many unsuccessful attempts to win the Prix de
Rome, he succeeded in abolishing the Académie Royale and with it much of the old regime's
system for training artists and providing them with patronage. The Académie was replaced
briefly by a body called the Commune des Arts, then by a group called the Popular and
Republican Society of the Arts, and then, finally, in 1795, after David was out of power,
by the beginning of the system--a combination of the Institut de France and the École des
Beaux-Arts--that dominated French artistic life during most of the 19th century.
As an artist during these years of his
dictatorship, David was frequently busy with revolutionary propaganda. He had
commemorative medals struck, set up obelisks in the provinces, and staged national
festivals and the grandiose funerals the new government gave its martyrs. Some of his
projects for paintings at this time were never completely carried out: one of these is the
unfinished "Joseph Bara," which is a tribute to a drummer boy shot by the
royalists, and another is the sketched "Oath of the Tennis Court" (Louvre,
Musée National de Versailles et des Trianons, and the Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, Mass.),
which was to commemorate the moment in 1789 when the Third Estate (the commoners) swore
not to disband until a new constitution had been adopted. The "Death of Lepeletier de
Saint-Fargeau," painted to honour a murdered deputy and regarded by David as one of
his best pictures, was eventually destroyed. The result of all this is that the artist's
Jacobin inspiration is represented principally by "The Dead Marat", painted in
1793 shortly after the murder of the revolutionary leader by Charlotte Corday. This
"pietà of the Revolution," as it has been called, is generally considered
David's masterpiece and an example of how, under the pressure of genuine emotion,
Neoclassicism could turn into tragic Realism.
Later years:
1794-1825
In 1794, after his friend Robespierre had
been sent to the guillotine, David was arrested. At his trial he is said to have defended
himself badly, mumbling that in the future he intended to attach himself "to
principles and not to men." He was imprisoned twice, for four months in 1794 and for
two more the next year, apparently most of the time in the not uncomfortable Palais du
Luxembourg in Paris. He was consoled by being allowed to paint and also by the fact that
his wife, who had divorced him two years earlier for having voted for the death of the
King, now loyally returned in his hour of trouble and remarried him, on this occasion for
good. During his first period in prison, he painted from his window his only landscape,
the "Vue du jardin du Luxembourg à Paris" ("View of the Luxembourg
Gardens"). While he was held temporarily in another Paris building, he did an
unfinished "Self-Portrait." At 46 he appears as a boyish young man with
romantically disheveled hair, brown eyes, and a generally aggressive, if worried, look; a
cheek tumour from which he suffered all of his adult life and which is said to have
impeded his speech gives his face a slight twist.
Even during his imprisonment, he had
retained three studios in the Louvre, and, after the amnesty of 1795, he devoted to
teaching the same energy he had been devoting to revolutionary politics. Eventually,
between the "Oath of the Horatii" and the Battle of Waterloo, he was responsible
for the training and indoctrination of hundreds of young painters from all over Europe,
among them such future masters as Baron François Gérard, Antoine-Jean Gros, and
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. The indoctrination began with the premise that the basis of
art was the contour, and so it can be held partly responsible for the excessive emphasis
on drawing that characterized European academic painting in the 19th century. But David
himself, as his works show, was not always hostile to rich chromatic effects; as late as
1860 he could be called, by no less a colourist than Eugène Delacroix, "the father
of the whole modern school."
Neoclassicism was presumably inclined to
scorn portraiture, because a contemporary sitter would normally lack both the universality
and the nudity of an ancient statue. David, however, had done portraits, remarkable for
their psychological individuality and their look of solid flesh, since the beginning of
his career: in 1782-83 his sitter had been Alphonse Leroy, a Paris medical professor; in
1784 Mme Pécoul, his mother-in-law; in 1788 the chemist Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier, with
Mme Lavoisier. In 1795 the freed artist portrayed his pretty, elegant sister-in-law, Mme
Sériziat, and her dandyish husband. In 1799 he produced his famous period piece,
"Portrait de Mme Récamier," which he left unfinished because the sitter, then
at the start of her career as a reigning Paris beauty, proved unreliable about hours for
posing.
But David was not a man for the life of a
mere teacher and portraitist. In 1799 he made a spectacular reentry into public notice
with a new giant canvas, "Les Sabines" ("The Intervention of the Sabine
Women"). The picture, often mistakenly referred to as "The Rape of the
Sabines," represents the moment, a few years after the legendary abduction, when the
women, now contented wives and mothers, halt a battle between their Roman husbands and the
Sabine men who have come on an unwanted rescue mission; in the middle of the melee stands
the lovely Sabine woman Hersilia, appealing with one arm toward the Roman Romulus and the
other toward the bearded Sabine Tatius. The artist had said that his aim was to move away
from the allegedly crude Roman manner of the "Oath of the Horatii" into a more
graceful Greek manner, and he did win enthusiastic applause for the elegance of his
figures. He also won some approval for his supposed intention to preach conciliation after
10 years of bloodletting in France. But he attracted perhaps the most attention with the
nakedness of his ancient warriors; having ceased to be the Robespierre of the brush, he
now became, in a popular jingle, "the Raphael of the sans-culottes"
("without breeches"; the radical Republicans).
Napoleon admired "The Intervention of
the Sabine Women" and saw possibilities for self-aggrandizement in the talent
displayed. Soon David, without acquiring political office, was again a government painter,
first under the Consulate and then, after 1804, under the Empire. He was not, however, the
only prominent Frenchman to move from the Jacobin left to the Bonapartist right, and he
had evidently always been a worshiper of historical heroes. His most important Napoleonic
work is the huge "Coronation" of 1805-07, sometimes called "Napoleon
Crowning the Empress Josephine"; in it Neoclassicism gives way to a style that
combines the official portraiture of the old French monarchy with overtones--and
occasional straight imitation--of the masters of the Italian Renaissance. This picture was
followed in 1810 by the large "Napoleon Distributing the Eagles" and in 1812 by
"Napoleon in His Study", a sharply perceptive portrait notwithstanding its
conspicuously propagandistic intention.
After the fall of Napoleon in 1815, David
was exiled to Brussels. Cut off from the excitement and stimulus of the great events he
had lived through, he lost much of his old energy. Toward the end of his life, he
executed, probably with considerable help from a Belgian pupil, François-Joseph Navez,
one more remarkably convincing portrait: "Les Trois Dames dites de Gand"
("Three Women of Ghent").
Encyclopædia Britannica
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