The Art Of Jacques Louis David

( Originally Published 1906 )

JOHN C. VAN DYKE 'HISTORY OF PAINTING'

THE classicism of David was a revival of Greek form in art, founded on the belief expressed by Winckelmann, that beauty lay in form, and was best, shown by the ancient Greeks. It was the objective view of art which saw beauty in the external, and tolerated no individuality in the artist except that which was shown in technical skill. It was little more than an imitation of the Greek and Roman marbles as types, with insistence upon perfect form, correct drawing, and balanced composition. In theme and spirit it was pseudo-heroic, the incidents of Greek and Roman history forming the chief subjects, and in method it rather despised color, light-and-shade, and natural surroundings. It was elevated, lofty, ideal in aspiration, but coldly unsympathetic because lacking in contemporary interest; and, though correct enough in classic form, was lacking in the classic spirit. Like all reanimated art, it was derivative as regards its forms and lacking in spontaneity. The reason for the existence of Greek art died with its civilization, and those, like the French classicists, who sought to revive it brought a copy of the past into the present, expecting the world to accept it.

There was some social, and perhaps artistic, reason, however, for the revival of the classic in the French art of the eighteenth century. It was revolt, and at that time revolts were popular. The art of Boucher and Van Loo had be-come quite unbearable. It was flippant, careless, licentious. It had no seriousness or dignity about it. Moreover, it smacked of the Bourbon monarchy, which people had come to hate. Classicism was severe, elevated, respectable at least, and had the air of the heroic republic about it. It was a return to a sterner view of life, with the martial spirit behind it as an impetus, and it had a great vogue. For many years during the Revolution, the Consulate, and the Empire, classicism was accepted by the sovereigns and the Institute of France, and to this day it lives in a modified form in that semi-classic work known as academic art.

Vien was the first painter to protest against the art of Boucher and Van Loo by advocating more nobility of form and a closer study of nature. He lacked the force to carry out a complete reform in painting, but his pupil David accomplished what he had begun. It was David who established the reign of classicism, and by native power became the leader. The time was appropriate; the Revolution called for pictures of Romulus, Brutus, and Achilles, and Napoleon encouraged the military theme. David had studied the marbles at Rome, and he used them largely for models, reproducing scenes from Greek and Roman life in an elevated and sculpturesque style, with much archæological knowledge and a great deal of skill. In color, relief, sentiment, individuality, his painting was lacking. He despised all that. The rhythm of line, the sweep of composed groups, the heroic subject and the heroic treatment made up his art. It was thoroughly objective, and what contemporary interest it possessed lay largely in the martial spirit then prevalent. When he was called upon to paint Napoleonic pictures he painted them under protest, and yet these, with his portraits, constitute his best work.

RICHARD MUTHER 'THE HISTORY OF MODERN PAINTING'

DAVID 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 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. 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. For this starched rhetorical pathos lay in the mind of the age. 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. His philippics were carefully divided into three sections, like academic discourses. Patriotism resolved itself into tirades and correctly imposed periods. To that corresponds the calm composition of David's pictures. His cold pathos is the counterpart to that of the orators, whose fine feelings were expressed in fine phrases.

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 to-day. His enthusiasm was not, in the first degree, for antique art, but for the ideas of country, duty, freedom, progress. The words "antiquity" and "democracy" were of like meaning to him.

And how greatly this man was penetrated by the spirit of his age is shown still more when he discarded Greek and Roman tragedy, and, boldly attacking the present, gave himself up entirely to the delineation of what was in his own life and experience, and his direct observation. There he became not only a rhetorician, a revolutionary agitator, but a really great painter. Lepelletier on his death-bed, and the assassinated Marat, are works of a mighty naturalist. His portraits of the emperor, of the pope, of Cardinal Caprara, and others, symbolize the brutal greatness of an age which worshiped strength.

In his portraits he is neither rhetorical nor cold, but full of fire and the freshness of youth. Before any face to be modeled 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....

When many of his portraits were reunited 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 quite penetrated by its greatness; he even appeared as a painter of decided charm, who handled the phenomena of color and light as few others have done. Was this the man who had painted that wearisome `Belisarius' and that still more wearisome `Leonidas'?

David showed himself in this favorable light at the Exhibition only because the archeological side of his talent did not come to light. Only those works had been produced in which he spoke French and not Latin, did not seek to resuscitate the antique, but painted what he had seen. The historian dare make no such selection, else the picture of David would be incomplete. He was an artist with a Janus face, a quite peculiar medley of contraries. The works which we saw in the Exhibition were only those in which he, in a manner, protested against his own system. David himself would have put them contemptuously aside as "occasional" pictures, and would have exhibited those historical canvases through which he exercised an unhealthy influence on the further development of French painting. He was at heart as archæological as Mengs, and it was only through the great occurrences of the Revolution and the Empire that he was brought for a certain time into contact with life. . . .

At a time when France had begun to strive after political freedom art was again bowed down beneath the same yoke of the antique as it had been at the fullest zenith of the monarchy under Louis xlv. To the generation of 1789 that was entering upon life with fresh hopes and fresh passions David had nothing to offer but a borrowed formula of the past, only a sentiment of an-other long buried age, whilst the Revolution was so new and full of life. He endeavored to persuade these men who stormed the Bastille and founded a new state, that the truth lay in archaism, and that the art of the future could be founded only upon classical reminiscences.

And later, the more he lost touch with public life and found time to indulge in meditations, the deeper he fell back again into that archaeological current as it had been before the Revolution, under Vien. Before the year 1800 France had extricated herself from the antique republican views which had introduced the Revolution; thus David had to decide whether he should belong entirely to modern Paris or to ancient Rome. He chose the last, and the spirit which inspired his studio grew more and more pedantic. His `Sabine Women' is the most complete expression of this barren classicism.

A paradoxical man! Endowed with wonderful realistic capacity, and there-fore created to enrich his country with masterpieces, he let his talent lie under the spell of Roman art and of a barren theory. Against all the caprice of the eighteenth century, with its charming, alluring grace, he opposed a strict, in-exorable system as he believed he saw it in the antique. Simplicity, however, beneath his hands became dryness, nobility formal. The folk of yesterday, too, had laughed, loved, lived; in David's works life and love and laughter were banished. It was as though an archaeologist had discovered some mummies and taken them to be the actual inhabitants of some old town. 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 possible only by comparison and through composition to create a type of it. The human being of art ought always to be a copy of that perfected being, of that primitive man, whom the Roman sculptors had before their eyes, but who had deteriorated in the course of ages.

Thus in France the sensuous art of painting was converted into an abstract science of esthetics. The classic idea weighed upon French art and prescribed for all alike the same "heroic style," the same elevation, the same marble coldness and monotony of color... .

David completed his `Sabine Women' in the year 1799. It was the legacy that the eighteenth century left in France to the nineteenth, the century on whose threshold that tender and great immortal, Watteau, had stood, which had been so amiably frivolous with Boucher, had nourished itself upon virtue with Greuze, had glorified simple domesticity with Chardin, and finally echoed the beautiful phrases of young David—liberty, equality, and fraternity;—that century so tender, witty, fashionable, dissolute and sane, aristocratic and plebeian, joyous and fanatical, ended in France in the most barren classicism.

ANTONY VALABRÉGUE 'LA GRANDE ENCYCLOPÉDIE'

JACQUES-LOUIS DAVID is one of those painters who have exercised a most decided influence upon the artistic ideas of our time, as well as upon the destiny of the whole French school. Nowadays, under the influence of modern standards of art, he is variously judged. Both lauded and denounced beyond measure, we see in him a strenuous reformer, an autocratic and often brutal regenerator. His passionate nature made him the most powerful interpreter of the French Revolution. By some he is looked upon as one of the instigators of that movement in art which left its mark upon a portion of the nineteenth century; by others he is regarded simply as the head of the classic and retrograde school of painting in France. It is but right that he should be judged by us from the standpoint of the present, apart from all the prejudices of the past, our opinion of his work being based upon a study of his great canvases in the galleries of France, and of those pictures which have appeared from time to time in exhibitions... .

Assuredly a great artist, one whose ideals were of the highest, whose spirit was noble and well balanced, who was indeed an apostle of the beautiful such as he conceived it to be, David seems to us opposed to certain qualities peculiarly French. Advancing with unswerving step towards his goal, he scorned everything in the way of grace or sentiment. In color he felt no interest, seeking above all else to attain exceeding accuracy in drawing. Beneath an apparent perfection his work presents serious faults. Not a single note of color vibrates in his too uniform compositions. The nude is treated by him as if he were a sculptor rather than a painter. Many of his works have for their subjects scenes from classic tragedies, in which personages are elevated and ennobled by an ideal at once human, philosophic, and austere.

For our part we infinitely prefer to this painter of history preoccupied with his theories, the faithful and realistic portrayer of his own times. Alongside of the impassioned artist, who, forceful and eloquent as he is, seems now to be out of date, there is a calm, serene David, an observer keen and conscientious. Such is the man who painted the fine portraits of Pope Pius vi., General Gérard, and Madame Récamier. Here we have the personal, the intimate side of David, who is no longer the lawgiver of art, but the scrupulous and expressive searcher after truth—in a word, the lover of nature.

A grand figure after all, that of this artist who, although no longer the leader of the French school, yet offers in his work and in his life fruitful lessons full of force. The cold and mediocre style of certain of his pupils has tended to diminish his influence, but still that influence could never have been lasting, for like that of every absolute master, it rested upon purely individual principles, which, being peculiar to himself, were for that very reason false, FROM THE FRENCH

LEON ROSENTHAL 'LOUIS DAVID'

DAVID exercised a powerful influence over French painting for the reason that towards the close of the eighteenth century he embodied those rationalistic tendencies of the French mind which had been embodied by Poussin in the seventeenth. He brought about a prescribed estheticism, because the theories he formulated were in perfect accord with the instincts of his country; he gained the support of almost all the artists, and created a unanimity of sentiment such as no other artist since then has ever succeeded in accomplishing, for the simple reason that his faults as well as his excellences were intrinsically French. He was a painter bound by codes and system; a painter by no means flawless, it may be, but unquestionably a French painter.

Poussin could never have been said to have comprised within himself alone all the national artistic characteristics; together with him the Clouets, the Le Nains, the Chardins—painters of keen and close observation—must also be considered, for they represent an important characteristic of the French mind in art—the love of sincerity, of truth to nature. But in this respect we find David actually in opposition to himself, for face to face with the painter of the 'Sabines' stands the painter of 'Marat' and the `Coronation;' and if in his capacity as chief of the French school he inspires in us today only a historic interest, we are conscious that as a realist he is still very near to us.

As this last David made no proselytes; his methods in this direction were embodied in no formula; he was no teacher. But if, strictly speaking, he had no pupils in this kind of art, he undoubtedly forms a link between those painters of truth who preceded him and the bolder ones who followed. In-deed, the theorists who from observation of nature and from social and political conditions deduce general laws, might well lay claim to David, and, as a matter of fact, this they have not failed to do. In other words, those who ask that an artist should be sincere without passion, that he should portray life without taking part in it, will assign a high place to David as a portraitist; and it is by his portraits above all else that his fame has been definitely established. Because of them he steps forth from the rank of artists whose works possess interest for only the generation which enthusiastically hailed their ad-vent, and takes his place among those whose fame is recognized by posterity.

The historian of art can never ignore the rôle of David, leader of the French school, but it has been many a long day since the painter's historical works have aroused the admiration of the public or have been studied by artists. `The Coronation' and `The Distribution of the Standards' belong too exclusively to a particular period to be unreservedly enjoyed; even 'Marat,' al-though more detached from any special era, still belongs to the time when it was painted. David's portraits, on the contrary, gain more and more admirers as time goes on, so that today public galleries and private collections vie with each other to obtain them. This revival of favor after so many oscillations and revolutions of public taste is a sure proof of David's enduring fame.

No doubt this is not the kind of fame for which he hoped. Great indeed would have been his astonishment could he have known that his vast historic compositions would sink into obscurity, and that of his whole achievement posterity would retain only those works which he painted merely as pastime. His pride as a painter of history would have been hurt; but we, who no longer recognize the existence of any kind of hierarchy among the different branches of art, but acknowledge simply the greater superiority of genius, maintain that by what he accomplished his fame is sufficiently assured.

From David's strange life a lesson can be learned. He was inflexible in his formulae—formulae now as dead as are the canvases which they inspired; but there were moments when he asserted his independence, and it is because of these outbursts of his free inspiration that he lives to-day. And therefore it has come to pass that by a striking paradox the great leader of the French school of classicism himself proclaims the absurdity of formalism and system, and throws wide open to art the doors of individuality and of freedom.— FROM THE FRENCH