3 ft. 5½ in. × 2 ft. 9½ in. (1·05 x 0·85.)
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.
THE “CORONATION” PICTURE
When Napoleon rose to power, David became his favourite painter. The erstwhile Jacobin was chosen to paint the official Coronation picture (No. 202a), an enormous canvas, which, like most ceremonial pictures of this kind, has more historical than artistic significance. The lifelike portraiture of the numerous personages surrounding the central group of Napoleon placing the crown on Josephine’s head, is the chief point of interest. On the restoration of the Bourbons in 1815, David was sent into exile. He died at Brussels in 1825; but his influence is reflected in official French art to this day. It was he who imposed upon the modern academic school a rigid canon of formal classic beauty which is fatal to evolution and progress, because it does not permit personal emotional expression.
Less severely classic in form, and showing at least an attempt at approaching a little nearer to truth than David, is the painting of the figures of The Three Graces (No. 769), by David’s rival, J. B. Regnault (1754–1829), in the La Caze collection. The worst type of academic art is represented in the bituminous reconstructions of classic antiquity by his pupil, P. N. Guérin (1774–1833), whose Return of Marcus Sextus (No. 393) enjoyed, perhaps owing to its supposed political allusion to the return of the emigrants, a success which cannot be accounted for on artistic grounds.
PLATE XLV.—JACQUES LOUIS DAVID
(1748–1825)
No. 199.—PORTRAIT OF MME. RÉCAMIER
(Portrait de Mme. Récamier)
The sitter wears a white Empire dress, the train of which hangs down to the ground from the Empire sofa on which she is half reclining, with her left elbow resting on a pair of round horse-hair bolsters. Her face is turned towards her right shoulder. A wide black riband is tied round her fair curled hair. A low footstool in front of the sofa on the right, and a standing candelabrum of classic design on the left.