DAVID.HELEN AND PARIS.

His portraits have no less strikingly survived the fiery ordeal of time. In them, too, he is neither rhetorical nor cold, but full of fire and the freshness of youth. Face to face with his model, he forgot the Greeks and Romans, saw life alone, was rejuvenated in the youth-giving fount of nature, and painted—almost alone of the painters of his generation—the truth. Here his effect, when otherwise he was lacking in all naïveté, is actually naïve and intimate. The best painters have never treated flesh better. He had an aversion to palette tones, and sought after nature with unexampled attention. The fine pearl-grey of his colouring is as delicate as it is distinguished; in his portraits, especially, the relief-tones of blue and light rose seem almost to anticipate the delicate, toned-down tints of modern Impressionism. Himself an ardent Revolutionist, he was, as it were, created to be the portrayer of those men of an austerity like Cato’s, and those women with their free, masculine, proud gaze; that valiant generation that felt within itself a desire to begin civilisation again and found religion anew. The portrait of Lavoisier and his wife reminds one in its refinement of Madame Vigée-Lebrun. The chemist is sitting by a table covered with instruments; his wife, in an elegant light gown, bends attentively over him. The picture dates from 1788, and it still looks like some good work of the age of Louis XVI. Again, how intimate is the effect of the marvellous portrait of Michael Gérard and his family. The good man, in his shirt-sleeves, seems to feel really at home; a small boy is leaning against his knee, a girl is playing on the clavicorde. There is not the slightest suggestion of pose or a conventional type of beauty in this stout old gentleman sitting so comfortably in his bourgeois négligé, and with honest eyes gazing out so inquisitively round him. In a few other pictures the spiritual life of women is portrayed with remarkable tenderness. One of the earliest is the exceptionally fine portrait of his mother-in-law, Madame Pécoult, in 1783; then, in 1790, the portrait of the Marquise d’Orvilliers, with that expression of dreamy languor which plays round the eyes of the beautiful woman. The Louvre possesses, in the portrait of Madame Récamier, perhaps the most charming and attractive woman’s portrait that David ever painted. The beautiful Juliette lies stretched on a divan of antique pattern. She wears a white dress, her soft rosy feet are bare. The arrangement of the room coquettes primly with that simplicity which was paraded at the time. Apart from the divan, there is only a huge bronze candelabra to be seen. Then there is Barere’s portrait. He stands on the tribune, and delivers the speech which is to cost Louis XVI his life. The face is small and insignificant, the gaze cold and harsh, and on the mouth there is a shadow of bitter hate and narrow fanaticism. But the triumph of these portraits of men is that of Bonaparte. David was one of the first of the men of the Revolution to come beneath the spell of the Little Corporal. One day, while he was working in his studio at the Louvre, a pupil rushed in breathlessly: “General Bonaparte is outside the door!” Napoleon entered in a dark-blue coat “that made his lean yellow face look leaner and yellower than ever.” David dismissed his pupils, and drew, in a sitting of barely two hours, the stern head of the Corsican. Thus he passed into the service of Napoleon.

This man, who viewed himself only as the coping-stone of the Republic—after the example of Augustus when he transformed the Roman Republic into the Empire—was unwilling to show any opposition to the republican tastes. The first painter of the Republic was appointed to be the Imperial Court painter. What he had been under Robespierre he was under Napoleon: the dictator of his age, who maintained a supremacy over the whole of art similar to that which Lebrun held beneath Louis XIV. The “Marat” was the great work of his revolutionary, the “Coronation” of his monarchical period,—that colossal picture which, completed between 1806 and 1807, has handed down to posterity a true representation of the ceremonial pageants that took place in Notre Dame on 2nd December 1804. The moment selected is when Napoleon places the crown, which is carried on a velvet cushion by the Duc de Berg, upon the head of the Empress, who kneels before him in a white robe and a crimson mantle. The picture contains portraits of all the personages present at the ceremony, amongst them being David himself, as he stands on a platform and sketches at a small table. The whole composition of this picture and the grouping of the figures is full of stately gravity. Real energy and patience must have been required to paint this immense picture, though it shows not the least sign of fatigue. With the exception of Menzel’s “Coronation of William I,” I know of no historical picture of the century of as high an artistic value, with the like noble sublimity of colour, with so tender, quivering a light. There are certain portions of the “Coronation” in which the white robes, the deep-red velvet of the mantles, and gold embroideries affect us like a symphony in colours. When the picture was completed Napoleon visited David’s studio, accompanied by the Empress, his ministers, and his staff. The Court drew up, and the Emperor moved up and down in front of the picture, hat in hand, for more than half an hour, examining it in all its details. Finally, with one of those dramatic effects of which he was so fond, he lightly raised his hat: “C’est bien, très bien; David, je vous salue.”

DAVID.BELISARIUS ASKING ALMS.

David had now still better opportunities than at an earlier period of proving his great capacity as a portrait painter. His portraits of the Emperor, of the Pope, of Cardinal Caprara, and of Murat symbolise the brutal greatness of an age which worshipped strength. Even at the close of his life, when the Restoration had exiled him from France, there resulted in Brussels graceful and tenderly observed portraits, such as that of the daughter of Joseph Bonaparte, which will perpetuate his name. One, in the Praet Collection at Brussels—three women of indescribable ugliness—marks the pinnacle of his pictorial strength and keen naturalism. They are the “Three Fates” of 1810, and he has painted them with the true artist’s delight, and with a massiveness like that of Frans Hals.

When these works were brought together at the Paris Exhibition of 1889, universal astonishment prevailed when it was discovered what a great painter this Louis David was. He appeared in these pictures as an artist who stood completely within his age, who shared its passions and was permeated by its greatness; he even appeared as a charmeur who handled the phenomena of colour and light as few others have done. It is true, David showed himself in this favourable light at the exhibition only because the entirely archæological side of his talent was not represented. For at the bottom of his heart he too was an archæologist. Many of his works, such as “The Death of Socrates,” “Brutus,” “The Oath in the Tennis Court,” and “The Rape of the Sabines,” are specimens of a barren theory.

Against all the caprice of the eighteenth century, with its charming, alluring grace, he opposed a strict, inexorable system, as he believed he saw it in the antique. Simplicity, however, beneath his hands became dryness, nobility formal. He saw in painting a sort of abstract geometry for which there existed hard-and-fast forms. There was something mathematical in his effort after dry correctness and erudite accuracy. The infinite variety of life with its eternal changes was hidden from his sight. The beautiful, he taught with Winckelmann, does not exist in a single individual; it is only possible to create a type of it by comparison and through composition. The human being of art ought always to be a copy of that perfect being, primitive man, whom the Roman sculptors had still before their eyes, but who had deteriorated in the course of ages. Thus in France, too, the sensuous art of painting was converted into an abstract science of æsthetics. The classic ideal weighed upon French art and prescribed for all alike the same “heroic style,” the same elevation, the same marble coldness and monotony of colour. Jean-Baptiste Regnault, and François André Vincent, whose studios were most frequented after David’s, worshipped the same gods. After David’s departure, Guérin, in particular, endeavoured to bequeath to the students those genuinely academic rules which his pupil, Delacroix, has summed up in these words: “In order to make an ideal head of a negro, our teachers make him resemble as far as possible the profile of Antinous, and then say, ‘We have done our utmost; if he is, nevertheless, not beautiful, we must altogether abstain from this freak of nature, with his squat nose and thick lips, so unendurable to the eyes.’” When he had to paint his “Insurrection in Cairo,” therefore, Egyptians as well as Arabs must first be supplied with heads of Antinous and transformed from modern soldiers into ancient warriors, Romans of the time of Romulus, before they could enter into the kingdom of art. Everything was sacrificed to line,—an inflexible, inexorable, correct, and icy line, the conventional, ideal line,—not the true line which follows from observation of the infinite variety of nature.

Nevertheless, even in works constructed as these were by rule and line, we cannot fail to be impressed by the technical ability displayed by the artist.

Baschet.
DAVID.   THE DEATH OF MARAT.

France, who in her outward relations has generally had a feverish longing for change, has been in literary and artistic respects, as a rule, exceedingly conservative, has upheld authority, supported an academy, and prized limitations and proportion above everything. They had upset the monarchy, murdered the hated aristocrats, built up the republic, done away with Christianity before they ever thought of touching the three unities of the drama. Voltaire, who had a reverence for nothing in heaven or earth, respected the received treatment of the Alexandrine verse. And David, the great painter of the Revolution, who cast the pictures of Boucher out of the Louvre, and whose pupils used to shoot bread-crumbs at Watteau’s masterpiece, the “Voyage à Cythère,” yet conveyed with him into the new age, as an inheritance from rococo, its prodigious knowledge. The good old traditions of the technique of French painting were little shaken by him and his school. The Academy described by Quatremère as the “eternal nursery garden of incurable prejudices,” was indeed overthrown, but David became immediately the head of a new one. This age of absorption in politics developed an art to correspond, more disciplined than ever, girt round by an iron cuirass; and this art, notwithstanding multifarious phases, at no time lost its touch, technically, with the acquisitions of former epochs, but evolved itself in its various directions from one centre, distracted from its path by nothing brought into it from outside. Géricault, Delacroix, Courbet, and Manet, widely as they differ from one another, are links in one chain of evolution. Art comes from knowledge. This maxim, which David held in honour, has remained to the present day a dominant force in French art, and by virtue of this knowledge, which David received from the old masters and guarded as a sacred trust, France became in the nineteenth century the chief school of technique for all other nations. From the French the other nations learned their grammar and syntax; through them they acquired a wider horizon and a deeper insight into the great mystery of nature.