Jacques Louis David first satisfied the new requirements, and in so doing lent to French classicism, if only for a few years, a certain touch of far greater vivacity. He it was who carried through, in all its consequence, that reformation in taste which Vien had sought in externals, in costume, furniture and decoration; who inspired the gems painted by Vien with republican pathos, and became in this way the great herald of that age which read Plutarch and made Paris into a modern Sparta. David, Prix de Rome after three successive failures, still came from that “corrupt epoch” against which Republican prudery was so excited. At the age of twenty-six he had already painted Soffits, in the manner of his kinsman “Boucher, to say it with respect.” But the journey to Rome converted Saul into Paul. In 1775 Vien, on his appointment as director of the Roman Academy, had taken him to Italy as his best pupil, and hardly dreamt at that time that this young man would strike out on such an entirely new path from his Roman studies. He did not wait for the Revolution to be converted; when the hour struck he was ready. Thus his first pictures were in a manner the prelude to the Revolution. In them he had already quite consciously entered upon the road along which he was to go later. His “Oath of the Horatii” and his “Brutus,” both painted in Rome in 1784, proclaimed his programme. The little, rosy loves, the doves of Venus, and all the charming frivolity and gallantry of rococo, received their final dismissal, and rough men walked in their stead. He broke his staff over all that he had previously venerated, and declared loudly that he had sinned when in his youth he had believed in the flowery palette of rococo, and completed in tender tones those ceiling frescoes which Fragonard had commenced in the house of Mdlle. Guimard. Capricious frivolities had to make way for a manlier art, matter “that was worthy to rivet the gaze of a free nation upon itself.” Already, long before the taking of the Bastille, the painting of young David was valued by the rising generation as the artistic embodiment of their political ideas, imbibed while they were still at school. When the “Horatii” was completed it was not only old Pompeo Battoni who exclaimed, when he saw the picture in David’s Roman studio, “Tu ed io soli siamo pittori, pel rimanente si puo gettarlo nel fiume.” In Paris his success was universal; all the critics were unanimous in praise; David was the man after the heart of the age, for his picture was the first which spoke clearly and perceptibly of the pathos of the revolution which stood at the threshold. People saw in it an “example of patriotism which knew no obstacles,” since not even love for their sister, who was betrothed to the enemy, prevailed upon the Horatii to refrain from combat with the Curiati. His next picture, “Brutus” as he received the lictors, when they bring him the bodies of his sons who have been implicated in a monarchical conspiracy, was greeted as allegorical of the incorruptible justice of republicanism. The populace saw in it the “glorification of the chastisement of all traitors to liberty,” and acclaimed David because he “had founded the sinewy style which should characterise the heroic deeds of the revolutionaries, children of liberty, equality, and fraternity.” And one understands—when one also adds the influence of Napoleon—this reaction of military simplicity against the effeminacy of rococo.

DAVID.MADAME RÉCAMIER.

David, at the outbreak of the Revolution, no longer a young man, but forty years old, was the terrible painter of the age, its despotic dictator. As a deputy in the Convention he not only ruled over painting, but also imposed his taste upon sculpture, ivory work, goldsmiths’ work, and decoration. He designed the new costumes for the deputies and ministers. As organiser of public fêtes, he brought to life again the whole of republican Rome. He was one of those rare artists who are the men of their hour. To a new plebeian race, to whose feverishly excited patriotism the soft, luxurious, aristocratically reprehensible art of rococo must seem as a mockery of all the rights of men, he showed, for the first time, the man, the hero who died for an idea or for his country; and he gave this man huge and elastic muscles, like those of a gladiator who struggles in the arena. He was a second Hercules, cleansing the Augæan stables; with his own strong shoulders he thrust back the petulant band of painters who had tarried too long in the island of Cythera. He applied art to the heroism of the day, gave it the martial attitude of patriotism, inspired it with the spirit of Robespierre, St. Just, and Danton. The more obtrusively his heroes paraded their patriotism, the more people saw in them a picture of the French nation, as true as a transposition could hope to be. This strained rhetorical pathos dwelt in the mind of the age. Talma moved the people to enthusiasm when he played the “Horatii” of Corneille in the classic cothurnus. When David painted, the state declamations of the orators still rang in his ears. Robespierre is said to have spoken from the tribune slowly, rhythmically, artistically: a Bossuet in his rostrum, a Boileau in his chair, while the volcano quivered beneath his very feet: his philippics were carefully divided into three sections, like academic discourses: his patriotism resolved itself into tirades with correctly composed periods. In David’s pictures we have an exact correspondence with all this: the rigid classicality of his composition, figures grouped as though on parade; his cold pathos, the counterpart to that of the orators’ fine sentiments set forth in fine phrases.

The great distinction between the beginning of modern art in Germany and in France is that in France the new style was not only called forth by the influence of a scientific programme from outside, but stood in conjunction with a great transformation in culture, and that it was compelled at first to concern itself not only with imitation and philological retrospect, but with the free expression of the characteristically modern spirit. German art had no new pronouncement to make through the medium of the antique; it followed, on the other hand, the programme of an artistically barren scholar who forgot that archæology is not art, recommended imitation as the path to perfection, and perpetually reminded the artists who followed him how widely they deviated from the correct lines of the model. “Afterwards they rebuke it, and say it is not antique and consequently not good art,” as Albrecht Dürer had complained of such people. In the earnest sentiment, the exalted Roman spirit, the declaiming over rugged, masculine virtues, freedom and patriotism, that found expression in David’s first pictures, there lived something of the Catonian spirit of the Terror; and that still gives them historical value. His enthusiasm was not, first and foremost, for antique art, but for the ideas of country, duty, freedom, progress. The words antiquity and democracy were of like meaning to him.

DAVID.THE OATH OF THE HORATII.

And how thoroughly this man was permeated with the spirit of his age is shown still more when he discarded the cothurnus, boldly attacked the present, and gave himself up entirely to the delineation of what came under his direct observation in his own life and experience. There he became not only a rhetorician, a revolutionary agitator, but a really great painter. Lepelletier on his death-bed, the assassinated Marat, and the dead Barre, are works of a mighty naturalist. Lepelletier, one of the many deputies who had voted for the death of Louis XVI, was treacherously assassinated in Paris, on 20th January 1793, by a valet of the king’s. The body was publicly exhibited; David painted it, and on 29th March presented the picture to the Convention. As the portrait of the “first Martyr of Liberty,” it was hung in the Convention chamber. On 13th July 1793 Marat, the man-of-terror, fell a victim to the knife of Charlotte Corday. David was presiding at the Jacobin Club when the news was brought him, and he embraced the citizen who had arrested the girl. Deputations of the people appeared in the Convention to express their grief for the heavy loss. Suddenly a voice was heard to cry: “Où es tu, David? Tu as transmis à la posterité l’image de Lepelletier mourant pour la patrie, il te reste encore un tableau à faire.” Silence succeeded in the Assembly. Then David started up: “Je le ferai.” On 11th October he informed the Convention that his “Marat” was finished. “The people asked for their murdered man back again, longed to look once more on the features of their truest friend. They cried to me: ‘David, take up your brush, avenge Marat, so that the enemy may blanch when they perceive the distorted countenance of the man who became the victim of his love for freedom.’ I heard the voice of the people, and obeyed.” Thus David spoke in the Assembly when he presented the Republic with the picture of the murdered man—one of the most thrilling representations of that awful age. The body is lying in the bath. Only the naked upper part of the body, and the head, with a dirty cloth tied round it, and fallen back upon the right shoulder, are visible; one hand, resting back on the side of the bath, still holds a paper in a convulsive grip; the other hangs down limp and dead to the ground. Over this head, with the half-closed eyelids, and the mouth distorted from the death-throes, Caravaggio would have rejoiced, there is such keen naturalism in every stroke of the brush. Like Géricault, in later times, David was then a regular visitor at the Morgue, attended at executions, and took an interest in the convulsive muscular movements of the guillotined. And the colour, too, like the drawing, is of a naturalistic strength to which he never again attained. The light falls slantingly on the corpse from above and throws the head, shoulder, and one arm into strong relief, while all the rest is left in obscurity. In this awful still-life of uncompromising reality and tragical grandeur he has created a work in the midst of an age of storm which will survive all storms and all changes of taste.

Seemann, Leipzig.
DAVID.THE RAPE OF THE SABINES.