LOUIS DAVID
The boudoir art of the ancien régime came to a natural end through the great social upheaval of the Revolution, of which Jacques Louis David (1748–1825) is the very personification in the realm of painting. As a pupil of Boucher, David in his early years was essentially a child of the eighteenth century. That he became the founder and head of a new classicist school, as tyrannical in his sway as had been Le Brun during the reign of Louis xiv., was due to the teaching of Joseph Marie Vien, whom he accompanied to Rome in 1775, the year in which Vien was appointed Director of the École de Rome. Vien was an eclectic and a purist of greater ability than would appear from his two dull pictures at the Louvre, St. Germain and St. Vincent (No. 964) and The Sleeping Hermit (No. 965).
David’s participation in the events of the year 1789 and his ardent republicanism did not, as has often been stated, attract him to subjects from Republican Roman history. Indeed, he had already painted The Oath of the Horatii (No. 189) and The Lictors taking to Brutus the Corpse of his Sons (No 191), for Louis xvi., and was only following the current of taste in devoting himself to the study of the antique and to antiquarian research. These two pictures, in spite of their cold classicism and theatricality, met with sensational success on their first appearance at the Salon. It is not in such works as these, nor in the Rape of the Sabine Women (No. 188), compared with which even Poussin’s version of the same theme appears like a glimpse of actual life, that David’s talent found its happiest expression, but in the unaffected and irresistibly charming Portrait of Mme. Récamier (No. 199, [Plate XLV.]) reclining on an Empire sofa. Whatever this picture may owe to the sitter’s grace and beauty and to the fact that it was never finished, and thus retained the freshness of a sketch, it is certainly one of the most attractive masterpieces of the French school. Here, as in the group of Three Ladies of Ghent (No. 200a), in which the luminous quality of the fresh tones is enhanced by the general greyness of the scheme, we have the work of a real painter, whilst David’s bombastic historical compositions are scarcely more than tinted cartoons.