JACQUES LOUIS DAVID AS A YOUNG MAN. FROM A PAINTING BY HIMSELF.
The exact date of this picture is unknown; but it was, presumably, painted before 1775, when David, having received the Prix de Rome, went to Italy for the first time. It was given to the Louvre, where it now is, by the painter Eugene Isabey in 1852; David had presented it to the elder Isabey, also a painter.
It was undoubtedly at this time, when revolt was in the air and man was preoccupied with his primal right to liberty of existence, that art was given the bad name of a luxury. Until its long prostitution throughout the seventeenth century, its mission had been noble; but now, coincident to the fall of the old régime, the people, from an ignorance which was more their misfortune than their fault, confounded art with luxuries more than questionable, in which their whilom superiors had indulged while they lacked bread. With the curious assumption of Spartan virtue which rings with an almost convincing sound of true metal through so many of the resolutions passed by the National Convention of France, in the days following the holocaust of the Reign of Terror, there was serious debate as to whether pictures and statues were to be permitted to exist or their production encouraged.
This debate must have fallen strangely on the ears of one of the members of the Convention, who had already made his power as an artist felt, and who was from that time for more than forty years to be the directing influence, not only of French art, but of painting on the Continent in general. This man, Jacques Louis David, in point of fact was soon practically to demonstrate to his colleagues that art had as its mission other aims than those followed by the painters of the preceding generations. It fell that Lepelletier, one of the members of the Convention, was assassinated, and David's brush portrayed him as he lay dead; and the picture, being brought into the legislative hall, moved the entire assembly to a conviction that the art of the painter struck a human chord which vibrated deep in the heart of man.
MICHEL GÉRARD AND HIS FAMILY. FROM A PAINTING BY DAVID.
Michel Gérard was a member of the National Assembly, the body which ruled France in the first years of the Revolution, from 1789 to 1791. The picture represents him in the midst of his family, attired with the simplicity affected by the Revolutionary leaders at that time.
But a little later, when Marat, "the Friend of Man," was stricken down, a voice rose in the Convention, "Where art thou, David?" And again, responding to the call, he painted the picture of the dead demagogue lying in his bath, his pen in hand, a half-written screed on a rude table improvised by placing a board across the tub; and again the picture, more eloquent, more explanatory of character and of epoch than any written page of history, was a convincing argument that painting was not a plaything.
Born August 21, 1748, a man over fifty years of age when this century commenced, David may yet be considered entirely our own; for the ideas of his country, despite minor influences that have affected modern art, have prevailed in the art of all other countries, and these principles were largely formulated by him. France has been throughout this century the only country which has steadfastly encouraged art, with a system of education unsurpassed in any epoch, and by the maintenance of a standard which, however rebellious at times, every serious artist has been and is obliged to acknowledge. A cousin—or, as some authorities have it, a grand-nephew—of Boucher (the artist who best typifies the frivolity of the art of the eighteenth century, so that there is grim humor in the thought that this iconoclast was of his blood), David was twenty-seven years of age when, in 1775, he won the Prix de Rome, which enabled him to go to Italy for four years at the expense of the government. He was the pupil of Vien, a painter whose chief merit it was to have inspired his pupil with a hatred of the frivolous Pompadour art of the epoch; and David only obtained the coveted prize after competing five successive years. It is instructive to learn that of this first sojourn at Rome almost nothing remains in the way of painting; for the young artist, endowed with the patience which is, according to Goethe, synonomous with genius, devoted all his time to drawing from the antique.
It was here and during this time, doubtless, that he formed his conviction that painting of the highest type must conform to classical tradition—that all nature was to be remoulded in the form of antique sculpture. But it was also at this time, and owing to his stern apprenticeship to the study of form, that he acquired the mastery of drawing which served him so well when in the presence of nature; and with no other preoccupation than to reproduce his model, he painted the people of his time and produced his greatest works. For by a strange yet not unprecedented contradiction, David's fame to-day rests, not upon the great classical pictures which were the admiration of his time and by which he thought to be remembered, but on the portraits which, with his mastery of technical acquirement, he painted with surprising truth and reality.