path: root/75887-0.txt

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 75887 ***





Transcriber’s Note: Italics are enclosed in _underscores_. Additional
notes will be found near the end of this ebook.




[Illustration: MLLE. CHARLOTTE DU VAL D’OGNES

_The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York_]




                          JACQUES LOUIS DAVID
                       AND THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

                                   BY
                            W. R. VALENTINER

                             [Illustration]

                                NEW YORK
                       FREDERIC FAIRCHILD SHERMAN
                                MCMXXIX




                          Copyright, 1929, by
                          Frederic F. Sherman




                                   TO
                       ELEANOR AND EDSEL B. FORD




ILLUSTRATIONS


  MLLE. CHARLOTTE DU VAL D’OGNES                            Frontispiece

  FIG. 1  MADAME DE SERVAN (1799)                                      3

  FIG. 2  H. RIGAUD: GENTLEMAN PLAYING A BAGPIPE                       3

  FIG. 3  F. BOUCHER: MADAME DE POMPADOUR                              3

  FIG. 4  MINERVA’S CONQUEST OF MARS (1771)                            4

  FIG. 5  THE BLIND BELISARIUS (1781)                                  8

  FIG. 6  THE OATH OF THE HORATII (1784)                               8

  FIG. 7  VILLAGE OUTSIDE ROME (1788)                                  8

  FIG. 8  VIEW IN ROME (1788)                                          8

  FIG. 9  PEN SKETCH OF MARIE ANTOINETTE (1793)
            _Made from the artist’s window as the tumbril
            halted on the way to the scaffold_                        14

  FIG. 10 STUDY FROM THE ITALIAN SKETCHBOOK (1788)                    14

  FIG. 11 MICHEL GÉRARD AND HIS FAMILY (1789)                         18

  FIG. 12 PORTRAIT OF BARÊRE (1793)                                   22

  FIG. 13 LAVOISIER AND HIS WIFE (1787)                               26

  FIG. 14 MME. DE RICHMOND AND HER SON (_c._ 1800)                    26

  FIG. 15 LE PELLETIER (1793) _From engraving in the Louvre_          26

  FIG. 16 MARAT (1793)                                                26

  FIG. 17 DANTON (1799) _From drawing in the Museum, Lille_           26

  FIG. 18 MADAME SERIZIAT AND SON (1795)                              32

  FIG. 19 MONSIEUR SERIZIAT (1795)                                    32

  FIG. 20 MARAT (1793)                                                38

  FIG. 21 ST. JUST (1792)                                             44

  FIG. 22 SELF PORTRAIT                                               44

  FIG. 23 WOMAN OF THE REVOLUTION (1795)                              51

  FIG. 24 NAPOLEON AS FIRST CONSUL (1797)                             51

  FIG. 25 PORTRAIT OF VIGÉE LEBRUN (1793)                             54

  FIG. 26 MADAME RECAMIER (1800)                                      54

  FIG. 27 INGRES AS A BOY (1795)                                      54


[Illustration: FIG. 2. H. RIGAUD: GENTLEMAN PLAYING A BAGPIPE

_Museum, Aix_]

[Illustration: FIG. 1. L. DAVID: MADAME DE SERVAN (1799)

_Private Possession, New York_]

[Illustration: FIG. 3. F. BOUCHER: MADAME DE POMPADOUR

_Collection of Maurice de Rothschild, Paris_]




                          JACQUES LOUIS DAVID

                       AND THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

                                   ❦


Is it possible that a period like the French Revolution and the era
of Napoleon’s tyrannous rule should witness the development of a
great art? It would seem that in the domain of art fresh creative
impulses are born more often in times of unrest and disturbance than
in periods of political security. Those epochs in the history of art
which we regard today as “golden ages”--the age of Pericles; the
Renaissance at about 1500; the Holland of the day of Frans Hals and
Rembrandt--were by no means peaceful years, but periods of national
strife and revolutionary ideas. No happy alliance is possible between
political discipline and art which springs from the free, untrammeled
impulse of the individual. We need only walk through those galleries
at Fontainebleau arranged by Napoleon during the days of his Empire to
recognize the deadening influence exerted by an established autocracy,
and feel blow coldly over us the chilly breath of an academic and
court-inspired art.

On the contrary, the period of the French Revolution, and the days
of Napoleon’s struggle to power, which coincided with the period of
David’s finest achievement, witnessed so powerful an onrush of new
ideas that their influence persists till the present day. Modern art
had its inception in this period, and today, after a lapse of over
a hundred years, is again tending in the direction first indicated
by David. It is herein that the significance of his contribution
lies. Helped by the influences of the revolution, he destroyed the
artificial, hyper-refined art ideals of the eighteenth century, and
substituted for them a sterner, simpler, more healthy and democratic
art. That is not to affirm that his art was greater than the one it
superseded. David was not a genius of the highest order as was Watteau,
but to those of us sensitive to the forces underlying our own times, it
says--or should say--more than pre-revolutionary art.

We need only to compare a portrait of David’s style like the one of
Madame de Servan (Fig. 1) with portraits of his predecessors (Figs.
2 and 3) in order to recognize the difference between the Rococo
period and the new era, introduced by David. This portrait of Madame
de Servan, painted about 1800,[1] impresses one as a composition of
statuesque simplicity expressing the salient spirit of a period which
was seeking fundamentally new doctrines by which to govern life. The
portrait by Rigaud, the famous court painter of the reign of Louis XIV,
painted in the beginning of the century, and of Boucher’s portrait
of Madame de Pompadour, painted in 1758, do not differ too much from
another in style. In these portraits of the Rococo period the surface
is filled with a restless play of short-curving lines; light and
shadow are alternated perpetually at close intervals; the colors form
a pleasing pattern of small variegated patches, and the costume and
accessories almost eclipse the real motif--that of portraiture. In
David’s canvas the figure emerges clearly from a wide and empty space,
and a clear, flowing line with definite horizontals and verticals
has replaced the tortuous curves. It seems an extraordinary piece of
daring for the artist to have composed in these broad planes with a
completely empty background, when we consider the century-old tradition
embodied in the older paintings. It was the French Revolution, with its
rejection of old formulas which inspired this daring.

But just as the revolution, from prelude to aftermath, covered a span
of some twenty years, so the artist required a similar period of time
to gradually attain the classic style which we see here stamped with
the authority of his fifty years.

Jacques Louis David was born in 1748 in the middle of the Louis
XV period, and the school which fathered him was that of Boucher,
the frank exponent of the playful and elegant school of painting
fostered by the artificial social life of Paris. David’s earliest
known composition, “Minerva’s Conquest of Mars,” painted in 1771 in
the artist’s twenty-third year, and now in the Louvre (Fig. 4), shows
Boucher’s influence clearly. Here we still have the unquiet baroque
line of pre-revolutionary painting--the picture is full of detail,
the draperies worn by the figures flutter in the breeze like those of
Boucher and the cherubs beloved of this master float in the clouds. The
subject, too, is of the mythologic-allegorical character affected by
the painters of the court and the aristocracy. The Goddess of Wisdom
conquers the God of War! What irony when we remember that twenty years
later during the revolution the painter of this picture was among those
who helped let loose on France a war of twenty years’ duration.

[Illustration: FIG. 4. MINERVA’S CONQUEST OF MARS (1771)

_Louvre, Paris_]

If we look more closely we can discern an alien spirit behind the
apparently suave portrayal. Despite his subject the young artist’s
combative vein emerges. True, Mars is overthrown, but with what ill
grace he accepts his fate. It might be Danton himself, the great
revolutionary, overthrown by his enemies. A face expressing such fury
of despair, so spasmodically clenched a hand was never portrayed by any
of the playful Rococo painters, and can we not discern something of the
energetic Napoleonic spirit in Minerva’s conquering pose?

David must have been of a naturally passionate and excitable
temperament--possibly inherited from his father who was killed in a
duel when the boy was eleven years old. As a young artist he applied
for the Prix de Rome, and when he did not at once receive it from
the Academy, was about to take his life in despair and was only
persuaded by a friend to abandon the idea of starving himself to death
after three days of fasting with that purpose in view. Later on, in
extenuation of this episode, he said: “This postponement of my journey
to Italy was prejudicial to my development, as I was four years too
late in abandoning the bad style of the French painters.” Like all
reformers he believed that everything produced by the generation
preceding him was bad, although today all that we can say is that it
was different!

When, in 1775, he did actually set out for Rome, and his friends at
parting advised him to beware the influence of the antique, he replied
proudly, “Antique art cannot seduce me--it lacks fire and passion.”
Before long, however, he was in thrall to the classic art of Italy, and
within a few years his art had undergone a complete transformation, not
only in form but in subject. One of the first pictures that he sent
from Italy in 1781 to be exhibited in Paris was “The Blind Belisarius,”
now in the Museum at Lille (a later version, painted in 1784, in the
Louvre) (Fig. 5). Belisarius, once an all-powerful general of the Roman
Emperor Justinian, crouches, old, blind and poor by the side of the
road. The saviour of Rome and conqueror of Carthage has fallen into
disgrace with a master jealous of his fame, and is reduced to beggary.
A rich Roman lady, with tears in her eyes, is placing alms in the old
man’s helmet held out by a youth, while a passing soldier recognizes
his old commander with surprise and pain. Our artist has turned his
back on the cheerful Olympian themes of the allegoric-mythological
school, and with this tragic subject descends to that world of sorrow
and misery in which, but a few years later, he was to see his own
nation engulfed. He is still preoccupied, however, with classic themes
seen through the eyes of that antiquity in which he had submerged
himself. He has not yet completely achieved his individual style, and
Boucher’s influence is superseded by that of another French painter who
represented the classic style one hundred years earlier--Poussin.

This influence lasted throughout his Italian period. Even as late as
1788 we are constantly reminded in his landscape studies of Nicolas
Poussin and Claude Lorrain, as may be exemplified by the two pages from
an hitherto unpublished Italian sketchbook dated 1788, reproducing
views from the surroundings of Rome (Figs. 7 and 8).[2]

[Illustration: FIG. 5. THE BLIND BELISARIUS (1781)

_Museum, Lille_]

[Illustration: FIG. 6. THE OATH OF THE HORATII (1784)

_Louvre, Paris_]

Just as the poets and orators of the revolution harked back to the
classic trend of the seventeenth century--as Voltaire and even
Robespierre evoked Racine and Corneille--David, too, now followed a
trend of French art which has persisted from medieval times to the
present day, that line of classic, simple, antiquely conceived, clearly
constructed creations from which the highly developed church sculptures
of the middle ages, the Renaissance paintings of the period of Francis
I, and the art of Claude Lorrain and Poussin derive. Simplicity
and straight lines replaced the restless, complicated curve in the
composition of the Belisarius. It is not alone in the architecture,
strongly influenced by the antique, that the horizontal and vertical
line multiplied itself, the painter, too, sought to lend strength and
rhythm to his composition by a parallelism in the gestures of his
figures. The arms of Belisarius and the boy follow the same line, as do
their feet, and the soldier’s hands repeat the parallel gesture.

[Illustration: FIG. 7. VILLAGE OUTSIDE ROME

From the Italian sketchbook (1788)

_Private possession, Detroit_]

[Illustration: FIG. 8. VIEW IN ROME

From the Italian sketchbook (1788)

_Private possession, Detroit_]

David achieved this linear coördination between figures and
architecture with even greater success in his next important work, “The
Oath of the Horatii,” painted in 1783 and now in the Louvre (Fig. 6).
The figures, divided into three groups, are posed in masterly fashion
against the three arches of the architectural background--three men on
the left, three female figures on the right, and the old man, holding
out the three swords in the centre. The movement swings from group
to group with the same rhythm that governs the curves of the arches,
and is strongly emphasized by the parallel lines of limbs and
draperies. We are told that the outstretched foot of the foremost
youth was drawn and redrawn by David many times. It is now in exactly
the right stance to determine the general linear movement and is at
the same time a masterpiece of naturalistic drawing. The pose of this
youth’s spear has been criticised as practically impossible, but it
requires precisely this continuous line to strengthen the rhythm of the
outstretched legs.

The motif is again drawn from Roman history, this time via a drama by
Corneille with which David was familiar. The three sons of the old
Horace, who occupies the centre of the canvas, were chosen by the
Romans to meet the Albans in single combat, the latter being also
represented by three brothers, the Curiatii. It had been agreed that
this combat should decide which race would have dominion over the
other. The victory fell to the Horatii, the representatives of Rome.
Two of the brothers fell in combat with the Curiatii, but the third
triumphed through a ruse--turning apparently in flight and killing his
three opponents one after another as they pursued him.

The trumpet call to freedom implicit in this composition must have
rung in the ears of the youthful French patriots who crowded to see
it, for it appeared at a moment when the soul of young France had
been stirred by the American war of independence. It was painted in
the year 1783 when Benjamin Franklin signed in Paris that treaty
with England in which, for the first time, the independence of the
American Union was recognized. Beyond the Atlantic there had come
into existence a republic comparable to the Roman republic, an
anti-monarchical conception whose ideals were sympathetic to the
progressive thinkers of France, though France was, at the same time,
the seat of Europe’s oldest and most absolute monarchy. How did this
message of freedom from across the ocean affect the youth of France?
Our artist’s ear was sensitively attuned to the ferment of radical
thought. While the painters of the older school, Boucher and Fragonard,
still painted their playful compositions and tried to dissemble the
tragic reality, the dull rumble of the coming earthquake sounded its
note in David’s paintings. His themes became ever more gruesome and
inflammatory. A painting in Marseilles depicts St. Roche pleading with
the Madonna to succor the sick, and the foreground is filled with
dead, plague-stricken bodies. Another in Valence represents the Death
of Ugolino with his Sons--that horrible scene from Dante’s _Divina
Commedia_ in which the Italian general and his five sons die of hunger
in a dungeon into which they have been thrown by his political enemies.

[Illustration: FIG. 9. PEN SKETCH OF MARIE ANTOINETTE

Made from the artist’s window as the tumbril halted on the way to the
scaffold (1793)

_Collection of Edmond de Rothschild, Paris_]

[Illustration: FIG. 10. STUDY FROM THE ITALIAN SKETCHBOOK (1788)]

“The Death of Socrates,”[3] painted in 1787, now in private possession
in Paris, enhanced David’s rapidly growing celebrity not only in
France, but abroad. No less a personage than Sir Joshua Reynolds, who
was then in Paris, said that he had studied the picture daily for a
week, and with every inspection found it more perfect. It was, he said,
“the greatest achievement since Raffael’s frescoes in the Vatican, and
would have done honor to the Athenians of the Periclean age.” Today,
of course, this estimate seems an exaggeration to us. The composition
is assuredly well planned, and admirable in many of its aspects: the
youth, who with averted face hands the poisoned cup to Socrates, and
the other youth in the background beating his hands against the arch
of the doorway. Some of the gestures seem theatrical, however, and
individual figures, such as the athletic and uninspired Socrates, look
as though they had been derived from a relief. The composition is too
studied; it lacks feeling. Why is it that David’s great historical
compositions are apt to leave us cold, especially those produced during
a period of great spiritual and political turmoil in which his own
sympathies were greatly involved? His part in the revolution amply
proves the strength of the passions which might have found an outlet
in his art. Why was he not the realist to dramatize those struggles
like Delacroix who lived fifty years later, when revolution and
world-war were over, yet who painted battles of all kinds with the
most terrific naturalism. The answer lies in this very fact: Delacroix
never witnessed the battle scenes he reproduced; they are the fruit of
his imagination. It is impossible for a significant realistic art to
develop during war and revolution. What one experiences at such times
is so horrible that the imagination is stifled rather than stimulated.
Only insensitive and coarse natures are capable of painting scenes of
horror through which they have lived. When, and as now in our days,
reality weighs all too heavily upon us, art, in self defense, becomes
abstract and withdraws itself from reality. It is for this reason that
the art of the revolution, David’s art, was stylized and cool: the
artist perforce took refuge from the horrors of reality in the kingdom
of his imagination. His art, like the poetry and oratory of the day,
was idealistic in trend. When Robespierre delivered those terrible
speeches that sent so many human beings to the guillotine, he spoke
slowly, rhythmically, in artfully rounded phrases, as though he were
holding an academic discussion. That the great revolutionaries,
among whom we must number David, thought idealistically rather than
realistically, is proved conclusively by their manner of expressing
themselves. Like all fanatics they lived in a world of dreams and
believed their ideas--which seemed to them so splendid--to be either
already realized or on the verge of realization. They believed only one
last great effort to be necessary, to achieve--though at the cost of
human lives--the freedom of humanity as a whole. This alone can explain
why revolutionaries who pursued their ends through rivers of blood,
seem at times inspired with a noble and unexpected humanitarianism; why
they were nearly all tender and devoted men in their private family
life. Danton idolized his wife and children, the letters of Camille
Desmoulins to his bride are beautiful and touching, and Robespierre,
the solitary, the incorruptible, whose private life was beyond
criticism, was a great lover of nature, who brought, we are told,
bunches of wild flowers home with him from his long walks.

With the portrayal of Brutus (now in the Louvre), who, because of his
profound respect for justice permitted the execution of his sons, we
find ourselves on the threshold of the revolution. Brutus, with stern,
dark countenance, is seated before the Goddess of Justice, while behind
him the bodies of his sons are borne across the scene and the grieving
mother and sisters cling together in the pillared hall of their
dwelling.

While today we feel the construction of this picture to be far too
studied, and are inclined to dub it academic, David’s intention was
directed precisely against the then accepted traditional formulas.
Whoever dreamed, said contemporary criticism, of placing the principal
figure in the shadow or planning a composition without regard to
the triangular construction? David left the centre of the canvas
purposely free. Our eyes fall first on a column, a chair, a still life
arrangement on a table, frankly at the expense of the composition’s
unity. The incidentals were drawn with extraordinary care. In order to
assure the accuracy of the classic furnishings, David had the cabinet
maker, Jacob, make the pieces for him after his own designs. The
painting created such an extraordinary sensation that not only did it
give the first impetus to the Parisian vogue for classic furniture,
but women’s fashions were definitely influenced by the loosely coifed
hair and long flowing garments of the feminine figures. Not the least
significant part of David’s contribution to art is the influence he
exerted on the decorative arts and on fashion. It is very rare that
the influence of a single artist’s work on a bygone style can be so
clearly measured as in the case of David, from whose art the decorative
art of the Empire period derived.

Only an artist who is much in the public eye can sway styles, and David
became one of the heroes of the day when this composition was exhibited
in the Salon of 1789--the year whose autumn was to see the outbreak
of the revolution. Perhaps no other picture has ever played so great
a rôle in the political and social life of a nation as this work,
which is by no means its author’s finest production, much less among
the finest of art history. All of which goes to prove how unreliable
popular taste is when it comes to a question of contemporary art.

It was of course the subject which evoked such enormous acclaim, for
the very name of Brutus was one to conjure with where the radical
youth of Paris was concerned. Wherever speeches on the new political
conceptions were made there was mention of the name of Rome’s deliverer
from the yoke of Caesar, and from Mirabeau to Danton the people loved
to connect the name of Brutus with their heroes. Even the opponents
of the revolution believed themselves to be inspired by him. When
Charlotte Corday murdered David’s friend Marat, she declared in
prison that she hoped to meet Brutus in Elysium. This veneration for
antiquity, which was characteristic of the revolutionary period, was
greatly fostered by David’s classical compositions.

[Illustration: FIG. 11. MICHEL GÉRARD AND HIS FAMILY (1789)

_Museum, Le Mans_]

The narrative of the German writer Halem,[4] who visited Paris
the first year of the revolution, and attended some theatrical
presentations, tells us vividly how familiar the populace was with
David’s painting. He attended a performance of the “Brutus” of
Voltaire, at the National Theater, and relates that although he
got to the Box Office at five o’clock in the afternoon, he had the
utmost difficulty in obtaining a seat. He writes, “Mirabeau stood
near me at the ticket office and because of his celebrity was given
a place in the fourth balcony. I followed him through the crowd as
best I could and managed to get a chair in a rented loge. Mirabeau’s
entrance was received with thunderous applause and cries of ‘To the
gallery, Mirabeau.’ As he did not respond a deputation waited on him,
the spokesman saying, ‘The French nation demands its Brutus.’ He had
to give in, and was borne away to be received in the gallery with
rapturous applause. What a triumph when later Valerius’ words to Brutus,

      ‘On you alone all eyes here are turned,
      ‘You who broke our chains and gave us the gift of freedom,’

were addressed pointedly to him. At the end of the play I was amazed
to see David’s painting of Brutus reproduced on the stage. In speaking
Brutus’ last words with which the play closes:

      ‘Rome now is free. That is enough.
      The gods be thanked,’

Vanhove, the leading actor, assumed the pose of David’s Brutus, and
the bodies of his sons were borne across the back of the stage. Every
Parisian knows David’s picture. Everyone instantly recognized the
intention of publicly honoring the artist through this presentation,
and general applause heightened the celebration.” So reads the
narrative.

What had happened? Why this enthusiasm of crowd and intellectuals for
a new day? Why these celebrations within celebrations? Even today,
almost one hundred and fifty years later, the words “French Revolution”
rouse our blood, literature is divided into opposing camps by which
either the revolution or the monarchy is condemned, and there are many
who hold in abhorrence the events of those days and the theories that
brought them into being and believe that the awful bath of blood might
have been avoided--as though revolutions were the work of men and not
natural occurrences like tidal waves that the individual can neither
bring into being nor arrest in their course. In the history of the
human race we see again and again how one social stratum after another
climbs up, pushing aside the one that preceded it. When, as in France,
a monarchy and aristocracy has been in power long enough to weaken in
its rule because security and luxury have undermined its morale and its
strength, another stratum, scenting this weakness, seeks to wrest to
itself this power which its fresh and undrained life force fits it more
ably to use. In France this social stratum was the Bourgeoisie, the
Third Estate, which from the beginning of the new era--the sixteenth
century--had grown strong commercially and illustrious in art and
literature, but had not yet achieved any political rights.

The nobility, however, preferred to die rather than allow the
power which they had held for hundreds of years to pass from their
hands--quite naturally, for the function of government is their only
element. So came the unequal battle in which from the beginning the
victory was to the young and powerful stratum. To the ruling class
form alone was left, while the class which aspired to rule possessed
passion. Like all young, unpractised and fanatical fighters, their
representatives shot far beyond their goal, and because, though
victors, they were still unpractised in the use of power, they abused
it, destroyed senselessly whatever still lived of the old régime,
and then turned upon each other until the strongest pushed the others
aside and became supreme. These strongest among the strong were
successively the leaders of the Constituent and Legislative Assemblies:
first Mirabeau, later the so-called Terrorists, among them Danton,
Robespierre and Marat, and finally Napoleon.

The democratic idea was victorious in the French Revolution despite
Napoleon, who, at first, embodied this idea in himself, and whose
Empire was only the short reaction which follows all new experiments.
Its consequences have persisted to our own day, when as the
revolution’s final result one monarchy after another in the European
scene has gone into eclipse.

If we would be just we must admit that during the revolution there
were heroes on both sides, among the monarchists as well as the
revolutionaries. Among the monarchists--to name a few of the more
notable--were the King, the Queen and Charlotte Corday. On the
revolutionary side we can muster practically all of the leaders,
who sooner or later almost all perished on the scaffold for their
principles, and we can familiarize ourselves with these men through
David’s portraits.

The outward events of the beginning of the revolution are well known.
The financial difficulties of the Government compelled the King and
his Advisors to convene the States General, which had not met for
generations. The elections of the deputies had already roused popular
passion, and when the Government, after the Assembly had convened,
endeavored to establish the old order in which all the power was vested
in the upper classes and the Third Estate had none, revolt broke loose.
Under Mirabeau’s leadership the representatives of the Third Estate
left the Assembly, and met, for lack of other quarters, in the Jeu de
Paume (the Tennis Court), where they took oath not to dissolve until
they had established a new constitution. This “Oath of the Tennis
Court” was immortalized by David in a famous composition of which only
sketches by David and paintings after his cartoon by other artists have
been preserved.[5]

[Illustration: FIG. 12. PORTRAIT OF BARÈRE (1793)

_Palais, Versailles_]

It was a year later, when the Revolutionary Assembly had established
its power, that it recalled that great day of the beginning of the
revolution and commissioned David to paint the picture. It is again the
German poet Halem, who describes the circumstances for us, in a letter
written by him after a visit to the Jacobin Club. He writes: “After
continued speechifying, Dubois de Crancé, a member of the National
Assembly, rose and recalled to the memory of those present that day
on June 20th of the preceding year, when six hundred harried and
unarmed Deputies, surrounded, as he put it, ‘by the Oriental pomp and
the bayonets of despotism,’ laid the cornerstone of French freedom by
the well-known oath of the tennis court at Versailles. Never could he
recall this event, said he, without his heart beating faster, without
a glow of patriotic feeling. He proposed the formulation of an address
to the assembly in which they should be asked to sanction (1.) That the
tennis court, grave of despotism and cradle of freedom, be declared a
national monument, closed, and dedicated to stillness.... (2.) That
the wonderful moment of this first oath be perpetuated by a painting
120′ high and 30′ wide, painted by the greatest of the French masters,
and hung in the National Convention. ‘I say,’ he continued, ‘by the
greatest of the masters, and to whom else could I refer than to him who
so nobly depicted Brutus and the Oath of the Horatii?’ The vaulted hall
rang with loud cries of assent. David the painter was present. Everyone
turned toward him, and pale with enthusiasm the young man stepped to
the orator’s platform and thanked the Assembly in trembling tones for
its trust, which he hoped from his heart to adequately repay, adding
touchingly, ‘Sleep will not visit me for many a night.’

“Then ensued a noble rivalry. Abbé Dillon arose first to vindicate his
right to appear in the picture among those taking the oath. He was one
of the few clerics who had belonged to the National Assembly before
the day of the Oath. At that moment he had been obliged to take charge
of the unimportant clerical archives, and consequently had not been
present. He called the members present to witness and his claim was
admitted. Then arose the Comte de Noailles to voice his approval of
commemorating the Oath of those brave citizens. ‘But, alas,’ said he,
‘the former aristocracy sees itself excluded and how many of us echoed
that oath in our hearts. If only the painter could depict us standing
in the distance with yearning hearts and the burning wish that we might
be among the celebrants of the Oath.’ A third stood up and expressed
the wish that the suppliants might be included in the picture. A fourth
demanded that those wretches who had been present at the Oath, but who
had later fallen for the good cause be not included. A fifth got up and
related a story of Bailly who after fruitless efforts to calm the mob
around the tennis court, stepped out and commanded silence _in the name
of the National Assembly_. This decision, this command, the name of
the National Assembly then spoken openly to the people for the first
time, had a great effect, had quieted the mob and perhaps determined
its future mood. The orator asked the painter if he could make use of
this incident in his composition. The painter stepped once more to
the platform and thanked them all for their remarks, begging them to
remember, however, that the picture must have both unity and historical
accuracy. He was generally applauded. Mirabeau then took the floor and
with marvellous adroitness conceded full despotic power to genius such
as that of the artist David, and proposed that Dubois de Crancé prepare
a written petition for the National Assembly. Dubois made the excuse
that he was about to leave for the country and cries of ‘Mirabeau!
Mirabeau!’ resounded. Mirabeau understood the call and accepted the
formulation of the address. He read it at one of the next sittings
and the master’s hand was recognized.” So much for the account of the
eyewitness.

David exhibited the cartoon for “The Oath of the Tennis Court” in the
Salon of 1791 and on Barère’s proposal the National Assembly voted
that the painting be carried out at the cost of the State and be hung
in the National Convention as an incentive to zeal. In the Catalogue
of the Exhibition David had stated that it was not his intention to
make likenesses of the members of the National Assembly. How easily,
nevertheless, the Parisian public recognized the various personalities
and what a sensation the composition made is proved by the fact that
Barère practically became a personage through the fact that David
portrayed him writing, in the left foreground, near the principal
group--placing on paper for posterity the tale of the great event.
Barère’s not too inspired journal, _Point du Jour_, became from that
moment a much sought-after sheet.

[Illustration: FIG. 13. LAVOISIER AND HIS WIFE (1787)

_Private Collection, New York_]

[Illustration: FIG. 14. MME. DE RICHMOND AND HER SON (_c._ 1800)

_Collection of Mr. Edward J. Berwind, New York_]

Despite the many characteristic types, David’s composition “The Oath
of the Tennis Court” is essentially in the monumental style in which
quite justly details are subordinated to the spirit of the whole.
The thronging crowd stands out against the bare walls of the Tennis
Court, in a clearly defined linear pattern, built up by the myriad
outstretched hands. The figures are all filled with a mighty dramatic
force. Bailly, the president, in the centre, stands like a statue of
bronze. For the first time David shook himself free of historical
subjects, depicted a contemporary event and proved himself well able to
adapt his idealistic style to such a theme. In this simplified idiom he
attained the expression of a dignified, rhetorical passion which he was
unable to encompass to a like degree in his historical subjects,
and the lofty idealism of the composition speaks well for the sincerity
and intensity of his convictions.

[Illustration: FIG. 16. MARAT

(Drawing)

Study for the painting in Brussels]

[Illustration: FIG. 17. DANTON

(From drawing in the Museum, Lille)]

[Illustration: FIG. 15. LE PELLETIER

(From the engraving in the Louvre)]

The radical Jacobin Club, whose members had pledged themselves so
enthusiastically to the promotion of his art, became thereafter
one of his favorite haunts. Because, as an artist, he was not
particularly judicious politically he allowed himself to be influenced
by the extremists whose biting logic is often more compelling to
temperamental laymen than are more moderate councils. David had,
as his whole career clearly proves, a rarely fine instinct for the
elementary forces in political and social life, and those to whom he
now turned, the representatives of the “Mountain”--to whom Marat,
Danton and Robespierre belonged--were as a matter of fact the strongest
personalities on whom leadership was soon to devolve. Thanks to them
he was elected to the National Assembly in 1792. He never assumed any
leading part, for a defect in his speech interfered with his public
speaking, but he often gave vent to his enthusiasm only by loud cries
of assent.

For the rest his contribution lay in the field of art. He busied
himself with cartoons for monumental paintings, with monuments, with
arranging national festivals, sketching classical costumes for all the
functionaries, and in organizing the artist world, always, we must
admit, from an idealistic standpoint. He has been much criticised
for the fact that he concurred in the King’s execution, and later in
Danton’s. In the condemnation of the King, however, he followed his
party; in Danton’s case his reasons were personal.

The principal oration against the King at his trial in 1793 was made by
Barère, the lawyer, who advocated David’s composition to the National
Assembly, and whom David later immortalized as historiographer in
his work. David painted a masterly portrait of him delivering the
Impeachment of Louis XVI (Fig. 12). In the composition which lies
before him on the parapet is written the beginning of the famous speech
which ends with the words, “The Tree of Liberty could not grow were it
not watered with the blood of Kings.” Barère, good-looking and a clever
orator, was not among the nobler of the revolutionaries. He belongs to
that very small group of revolutionary leaders who did not themselves
become sacrifices, but outlived the revolution in all its phases and
held public office even in the times of reaction under Napoleon and
the Bourbons. The Abbe Sieyès was another of this group. He was from
the very first a representative of the Third Estate and achieved some
reputation under Napoleon. David, too, whose art safeguarded him among
the dangers of the revolution, belongs to them. Both Sieyès, whose
clerical frock was his protection, and David were helped by the fact
that they knew how to stand aloof. Barère, however, was the type of
politician who trims his sails to meet the wind and uses his sagacity
to judge not where right but where might is and then diplomatically
allies himself to it in order to always be in the vanguard of events.
His accusations against the King only expressed the general feeling of
the people whom he strove to please.

True, this general sentiment would not have been possible had not
the monarchy for years been its own worst enemy and made of itself a
laughing stock. There is, indeed, no excuse for political murder. The
King merited the guillotine as little as did thousands of others on
both sides who were sacrificed to it on account of their political
opinions. That Louis XVI was arraigned before a tribunal of his people,
however, was in part at least the fault of the monarchy itself. This
particular King possessed very few of those qualities which a nation
expects from its sovereign. It is one of Fate’s most remarkable ironies
that Louis XVI had every desire to be democratic--but his manner of so
being was unfortunate to a degree. The story runs that as nineteen year
old Dauphin he used to pursue the servants laden with soiled laundry
in order to tickle them under the arms, and as King the blacksmith’s
hammer and anvil were his favorite diversions. The young and charming
Marie Antoinette found it hard to accustom herself to a clumsy husband
with soiled hands who emerged red-faced from his smithy and approached
her affectionately. It happened that did the King espy from a window
masons working in the courtyard below he would run down with rolled-up
sleeves to assist them. There is a certain kind of good nature that
is inappropriate to Princes. His portraits show him as having a
clumsy, phlegmatic figure and plain, not too intelligent features. A
typical representative of a doomed caste, he lacked any energy to stem
misfortune, any originality or appreciation of the new conceptions of
the day. It seems as though a curse rests on people of this type, that
everything they do tends only to make their situation worse, as though
they help to bring about their own destruction. What weakness when
in the hour of the greatest danger Louis writes to his brother, the
Comte d’Artois: “I have revoked the orders that I gave. My troops will
abandon Paris, and I will use more gentle means. Don’t speak to me of
a Coup d’État, a display of force. I feel it is wiser to wait for the
storm to abate, and to expect everything from time, from the awakening
of right-thinking people and the love of the French nation for their
King.” Ideas of this kind never arrested a revolution! It was fortunate
for him that his phlegmatic temperament could find refuge in prayer.
This quality helped him to meet death with resolution but was of small
service to the caste he represented. The times were too violent for
Christian temperaments such as the King’s. Once when David received
a commission for a portrayal of Christ, and his patron remarked
subsequently that the figure looked more like Cato, David’s reply was:
“The times are not favorable for Christendom.”

[Illustration: FIG. 18. MADAME SERIZIAT AND SON (1795)

_Louvre, Paris_]

[Illustration: FIG. 19. MONSIEUR SERIZIAT (1795)

_Louvre, Paris_]

The King, however, continued to rely on the love of the French for
their monarch. As a matter of fact this sentiment was centuries old and
had persisted until the early years of his reign, but the aristocracy
had helped by derision and calumny to destroy all veneration for the
monarchy, poets and writers sowed doubts as to the efficacy of this
form of government, and the nation began to lose its age-old respect
as the King’s weaknesses became apparent. It is common prejudice that
Princes on account of their eminent position should be different and
more distinguished than the common run of mortals, although history
proves that notable personalities are as rare on the throne as in other
walks of life. If a ruler is gifted, he can allow himself to come into
contact with his people; if, as in most cases, he is not, he is better
advised to allow himself to be admired from afar. Louis XVI, however,
did just the opposite. We know what undignified scenes took place
when the mob on several occasions penetrated the palace. An innkeeper
stepped up to the King and spoke to him saying, after the King’s reply,
“You did well to give me a civil answer, otherwise I’d have made you
headwaiter in my inn tomorrow.” If the King had given this rascal
the blow in the face he deserved, he might have been spared his long
martyrdom with the scaffold at the end. Instead, however, he went up to
another ruffian who had thrust a red cap on his head, and who seemed to
be stumbling drunkenly against a door and helped him to open it. Even
on the scaffold he wanted to help the executioner cut off his hair.
The cool fashion in which he went to meet his doom, at least, merits
our admiration. An American historian has fittingly remarked: “The
unruffled dignity with which he met death was the finest act of his
reign.”

Posterity has devoted much sympathy to Marie Antoinette whose portraits
by Vigée LeBrun (Fig. 25) and other court painters are familiar to
all art lovers. Although she, too, was by no means an outstanding
ruler her life is particularly rich in human and touching incidents.
Her very weaknesses are those which arouse one’s sympathy. Who could
blame the young Princess, brought to Paris from Vienna at the age of
fifteen, that she remained in tutelage to her mother and sought her
advice? But this very relationship which resulted when misfortune
overtook her, in an appeal for help to the foreign courts, brought
about her downfall. Who can fail to understand that the lovely
and vivacious Marie Antoinette, surrounded by the pleasure-loving
society of Paris, and tied to a dull husband to whom, nevertheless,
she remained faithful, should have looked about her for congenial
friends. It was this, however, that gave rise in court circles to
those calumnies which so injured her reputation among her subjects and
finally ruined her--calumnies founded only on gossip, not on facts.
Who could blame her for finding burdensome the exaggerated etiquette
of the French court, the public dinner of the King and Queen once a
week, the ridiculous ceremonies of the lever, the crowd which attended
even the birth of her children. And why should this inexperienced
Queen have been held answerable for extravagant expenditures for
gowns and festivities when her predecessors had spent just as much
and the money was always given with the King’s approval? Her only
faults were inexperience and lack of caution. Unfortunately, when her
husband proved himself unfit, she essayed, to her undoing, to take the
political reins in her own hands. In her endeavour to save herself
and her family she allowed her feminine sympathies and antipathies to
influence her politically and so made matters worse. The price she paid
for her mistakes was terrific. In all the history of royalty there is
hardly a more terrible plunge from the pinnacle of power and wealth to
the depths of misery.

Art and culture never bloomed more luxuriantly in France than in the
early years of Marie Antoinette’s reign.[6] The most exquisite taste
pervaded the mode and was displayed at court functions; the furniture,
ornaments, bronzes and porcelains designed for Marie Antoinette are
among the most delightful productions of French decorative art; the
great French painters of the Rococo period--Boucher, Fragonard and
Hubert Robert--were still alive, as well as the sculptors Houdon,
Falconet and Clodion. It was natural that the young Queen should have
preferred this art to David’s with its cold, stern quality and sombre,
tragic motifs; that she ignored revolutionary literature, preferring to
amuse herself with charming Italian operas or the music of Gluck which
she introduced to France.

That all this splendour collapsed suddenly with the revolution was
not the most serious thing that faced the Queen--misfortune pursued
her into her most intimate family life. She, who loved her children
above all else and who, when the gathering disasters grew closer and
closer to her husband, saw the collapse of one pillar after another
of her very existence. Her youngest child died in his eleventh month.
The Dauphin, a gifted and charming lad of seven, sickened. How could
the mother who lay sobbing across the death-bed of her son at Meudon
worry over the gathering storms in Paris through which pealed the knell
announcing the Dauphin’s death? Then came the days when the mob hung
threateningly around the palace and forced her to leave Versailles for
Paris in its triumphant train. When the populace stormed the Tuilleries
and she feared for the fate of her other children how deeply offended
was the dignity which she possessed in the same measure that the King
lacked it. When the Royal family were brought back from their unlucky
flight to Varennes amid the abuse and insults of the mob, the King
accepted it all with his usual calm and even tried to converse with
his followers. The Queen, on the contrary, suffered so horribly under
the humiliation that her hair turned white over night. This, however,
was but the beginning. Then came the parting with the King who was led
to the scaffold (January 21, 1793); there was the even more painful
parting with her children, and the torture of almost a year in prison
without news of them, within sight of the bloody heads which, like that
of her friend the Princesse de Lamballe, were carried past her window
on pikes. When she was haled before the Tribunal, where she made answer
calmly to all accusations, she was but a shadow of herself.

David made a drawing of her on her way to the scaffold (October 16,
1793)--a horrifying sketch (Fig. 9). Does there perhaps speak from it
the injured vanity of an artist whose work had once been ignored by
this former Queen? What a study in contrasts! This was she who only a
few years previously had been the lovely model for the most charming
portrait of the court painters.

Marie Antoinette was executed during the “reign of terror,” so-called,
the sanguinary and precarious years 1793–94. Following the results of
the revolution and its excesses all Europe had combined against France,
and only the utmost concentration of internal forces made victory
against such a coalition possible. The National Convention placed the
direction of affairs in the hands of a committee of nine, among whom
were Danton, Robespierre, Marat and St. Just, and this Committee
saved France. They formed and sent into the field the volunteer armies
which, at first unorganized, gradually obtained ascendancy over the
experienced coalition troops and finally drove them from the field.
Everything that might work injury to the troops at the front was
ruthlessly put aside. Hundreds of aristocrats followed the King and
Queen to the scaffold. Murder was the order of the day and thinned
out not only the friends of the old régime, but also the ranks of the
revolutionaries themselves. The earliest of these to fall in connection
with the King’s execution was Le Pelletier, formerly the Comte de St.
Fargeau, a member of the Convention, who was murdered by a member of
the King’s body-guard on the eve of the execution of the King, on
January 20, 1793, because he had voted for the King’s death. Busts of
Le Pelletier and Brutus were placed in the Palace of Justice, and David
quickly completed a fine painting of the victim which he offered to the
Convention in the following terms: “Fellow Citizens, each one of us is
responsible to the Fatherland for those gifts which nature has bestowed
on us; diverse though their expression may be, the goal is the same
for us all. Every true patriot should use every means to inspire his
fellow citizens and bring before them at all times the great examples
of heroism and virtue. I am moved by these thoughts in offering to
the National Convention the painting of Michel Le Pelletier who was
murdered in cowardly fashion because he voted for a tyrant’s death.”

Unfortunately this painting has been lost. Le Pelletier’s descendants,
into whose possession it passed, were Royalists, and hid the painting,
destroying the plates and all the engravings which had been made
from it. The reproduction (Fig. 15) was made from the only existing
impression in the Cabinet of Engravings in the Louvre. The composition
is conceived in the grand and austere manner which characterized
David’s work in these days of terror and fanatically exaggerated
idealism.

[Illustration: FIG. 20. MARAT (1793)

_Museum, Brussels_]

Before six months were up another assassination, this time of one
of the leaders of the revolution--Marat--roused the members of the
Convention and the populace to the utmost. Hardly had the news
spread abroad before one of the members of the Convention arose
crying: “Where art thou, David? You made a portrait of Le Pelletier
for posterity when he died for his country, now the occasion has
arisen for another work.” “This too I will do,” David answered, and
produced one of his most moving compositions (Figs. 16 and 20). It
is planned with great power and simplicity, and filled with deep and
tragic feeling, for Marat was his friend. Nothing has aroused more
astonishment than this friendship of David’s for Marat who has been
regarded as the bloodthirsty instigator of the horrors and deviltries
of the revolution. If we look into the matter more closely, however,
we must recognize in Marat qualities which explain the esteem of
men like David. He had remarkable philosophic and scientific gifts.
While his enemies described him as a quack doctor, or, as Carlisle
erroneously states, a veterinary, as a matter of fact his professional
contributions as an oculist were so remarkable that some of his
writings have been reprinted even of late years. Before the revolution
he was the most celebrated oculist of the aristocracy, and the Comte
d’Artois, later Charles X, had appointed him as his personal physician
at a salary of two thousand pounds. His philosophical writings, such
as the three volume _Essays on Man_ which appeared in English and
French, achieved a reputation for him abroad. Although he did not
become a member of the French Academy, on account of his disagreement
with Voltaire and his attack on Newton, no less a person than Goethe
expressed himself concerning this injustice. Benjamin Franklin,
too, was among those who visited Marat and were interested in his
experiments in physics.

On the outbreak of the revolution he abandoned his career as doctor and
scholar to develop an astonishing public zeal founded on his passion
for the new ideas. He influenced the development of the new forms of
government in no small measure, advised against copying the English
constitution with which he had familiarized himself during a stay in
England, and opposed all who attempted to assume Dictatorship, even
Mirabeau, then Lafayette and later General Dumouriez, whose treason he
foresaw before Dumouriez went over to the Austrians and the Girondists.
He voted for the condemnation of the King, whom he accused of treason
to his country, but advised against his condemnation for events which
happened prior to the revolution. That he was not so bloodthirsty as
his opponents would have us believe is proved by his insistence that
Malesherbes, the king’s advisor, should not be condemned with him as he
was “a wise and venerable old man.”

How many of the wild imprecations which were published against his
enemies, and particularly against the nobility in his journal _L’Ami
du Peuple_ may be laid at his door, is a question. This paper was
suppressed at various times, and while Marat was in hiding it appeared
with distorted versions of his opinions given out by his enemies or
supposed friends, in the endeavour to bring discredit on him. The
really established facts concerning him place him in no unfavorable
light. He opposed the Girondists because he opposed a foreign war,
from which he felt not only the Monarchists but those Radicals who
worked in the dark like the Girondists hoped to draw advantage,
and which he felt might result in the establishment of a military
dictatorship. He foresaw the September murders, and demanded the
establishment of a tribunal for the prisoners. This was not done, and
the murders consequently took place.

True his impassioned pen evoked death and destruction upon his
opponents, but he was persecuted all his life and his enemies
retaliated in kind. More than once he fled from death, hiding for
weeks at a time in cellars and in sewers and contracting from lack of
nourishment all sorts of bodily ills which his iron energy enabled him
to disregard. Ill, unable to attend the Convention, although working
all day long, he sought relief in hot baths where he wrote by placing
a board across the bath for his books and papers. With, in any case,
but a short time to live, he fell victim to the murderer’s knife in
the hands of an eccentric and talented young noblewoman, Charlotte
Corday, who hoped to end the revolution by murdering Marat, whereas her
deed had exactly the opposite effect. She belonged to the Girondist
circles whose persecution followed the outbreak of the war and whose
suppression Marat demanded when at first victory seemed doubtful.

Marat was unquestionably a true friend of the people and his published
and spoken convictions were utterly sincere. In spite of his powerful
and completely independent position, for he was affiliated with no
particular party, he rejected every salaried position, every political
distinction and lived in the poorest circumstances, the very bathtub
which he used and which later attained a sort of celebrity as a
curiosity being borrowed from a neighbor. He received petitioners
without number, and endeavoured in the “Letterbox” of his paper, which
he was the first to introduce, to answer the countless questions put
by the people. Charlotte Corday only obtained an interview with him
after several unsuccessful attempts, by pretending that she was seeking
help for a widow with five children. The paper which Marat holds in his
hand in David’s picture was sent in by her to obtain admission, and not
without reason or effect has the artist made these words legible: “13
July, 1793, Charlotte Corday to Citizen Marat.” “To be unfortunate is
to be sure of your assistance.” An order for 25 francs which Marat had
made out for the widow in whose name Charlotte Corday sought his aid
lies on the stool in the foreground. Her dagger seems to have found him
while he affixed his signature to it.

This composition is among David’s finest achievements in its
combination of very simple forms and great expressiveness. We almost
feel the corpse still lives, still breathes. The most touching
naturalness is combined with a truly heroic style comparable to that
of France’s great tragic poets, such as Racine and Corneille. If we
remember that at the time this picture was painted, the elegant Rococo
painters were still producing their piquant compositions, we recognize
that in art as in life a new era had dawned, an art founded on entirely
new conceptions, which built its compositions with large and massive
forms and sought again those depths of inspiration which had entirely
disappeared from the art of the court painters.

David painted still another composition as propaganda for his political
ideals. A thirteen-year-old drummer boy, Joseph Bara, fell in the
battles in the Vendee in December, 1793, and David was commissioned
by the Convention to immortalize the death of this young hero of
the Republic. This painting, now in the Museum at Avignon, although
unfinished, and very simple in conception, has many charming qualities.
French writers have particularly praised the purity and elegance of the
drawing and the beauty of the youthful form; and in fact the swelling
rhythmic line and vivacity of the bodily forms are very pleasing. If,
however, we analyse the essentially novel quality in this art, it lies
in the reduction of the composition to its bare essentials, combined
with a deepened expressiveness. The scene of the battle in which the
boy fell is only lightly indicated. In the background are clouds
which might be cannon smoke, and far to one side the disappearing
form of a standard bearer. The boy presses the republican cockade to
his breast with one hand--there is no other indication of the day’s
realities--everything else is universal, idealistic. The nakedness, the
boy’s idealized features, the wide empty spaces of the background with
its suggestion of a hill--everything is concentrated on the suffering
and inspiration which speak from the lines of the body. The moment of
transition from life to death--which to be sure the friends of the
revolution had ample chance of observing--is wonderfully depicted. We
feel the trembling of the body, the lift of the breast, the stiffening
of the mouth and of the half-closed eyes. The curious color scheme of
the painting, the thin sulphur yellow background, the pale blue shadows
in the figure, the luxuriant dark brown hair and the brightly colored
cockade--contrive a curious effect.

Close bonds of friendship united David to Danton and Robespierre,
the two other leaders of the Reign of Terror, as well as to
Marat--although this applies only to the early days where Danton is
concerned. The break with him is one of the episodes in the painter’s
life which is most difficult to explain although David can hardly
have been alone to blame, for Danton’s violent nature was prone in
moments of passion to transform friends into foes. It is unfortunate,
however, that David did not exhibit more independence in his political
opinions, and that even though he allowed himself to be dragged in
Robespierre’s train, he helped in the downfall of this most stirring of
the revolutionary heroes.

The varying attitudes of revolutionary critics make it even harder to
evaluate Danton’s personality and contribution than that of Marat.
Unlike Marat he was no knight of the pen, but a man of words and deeds,
living fiercely in the passions of the moment, and always at his best
in the times of greatest difficulty.

[Illustration: FIG. 21. ST. JUST (1792)

_Private Possession, Paris_]

[Illustration: FIG. 22. SELF PORTRAIT (1794)

_Louvre, Paris_]

The personal documents which give us intimate glimpses of the
personalities of the other revolutionary leaders are entirely lacking
in Danton’s case. He was too impulsive for this form of expression, or,
in his leisure moments, too lazy. His portraits give one an impression
of the strength and softness, obstinacy and good nature, energy and
procrastination, which characterized this hero of the revolution whose
dramatic fate has been the inspiration of many a poet. His career
was short but glorious. He rose like a meteor from the obscurity of
a provincial law practice to a dominating position, and during the
years 1792 to 1794 his powerful figure was in the foreground and
associated with every important event. His opponents accused him of
cruelty and dishonesty. It is undeniable that he occasionally indulged
his wild impulse to destroy those that opposed him, as witness his
speech, “Revolutions cannot be carried out on tea.” Although the
September murders occurred during his day, his guilt lies rather in not
preventing them, than in any instigation of them. He was occupied at
that time with the formation of the volunteer army, and the monument
erected to his memory by the City of Paris in the eighties, which
depicts him inspiring the citizens with flaming words to departure
for the tottering front, was well deserved. Whatever the faults of
his stormy and excitable nature, he did more than any other to save
his country in a moment of grave danger. So far as his dishonesty is
concerned, he seems now and then to have dealt not all too accurately
with State and private property, but his patriotism was none the
less sincere. We must remember that not all active natures can live
on nothing, like Marat and Robespierre, and that a powerful physical
constitution demands other recreations. Danton had far more love
of life than the dry Robespierre, and liked to be surrounded by his
men and women friends. He finally, to the horror of some historians,
acquired a small country property where he hoped, his labours over,
to retire with wife and children, an ambition destined never to be
fulfilled.

There is in the Museum at Troyes a portrait by David of Danton’s first
wife,[7] the brave Gabrielle, a healthy, capable and intelligent
housewife with black eyes and rosy cheeks--a true type of the new
Bourgeoisie. She seems to have been as cheerful as she was kind, and
gave Danton several children to whom he was tenderly attached. She was
destined not to see his downfall. When in February, 1793, he returned
from the Belgian front, he found that his wife had died and been buried
several days previously. It is characteristic both of his love for her
and his untamed nature that seven days after her death he had both
grave and coffin opened up, embraced the corpse and commissioned a
sculptor friend to make a death mask and a bust of her. His friends had
great difficulty in saving him from an emotional breakdown. Even the
cool Robespierre sought to comfort him in the most feeling manner in a
letter in which he pledges him his devotion and friendship unto death.
How quickly and how passionately they lived, these revolutionaries! A
couple of months later Danton married a sixteen-year-old girl, and a
year after that, Robespierre, who had promised--and undoubtedly with
sincere conviction--to be true to him till death, brought him to the
guillotine.

The dual rule of two temperaments so opposed as Danton’s and
Robespierre’s could not endure for long. One cannot conceive a greater
contrast than that between the robust Danton, who loudly proclaimed
his every thought and the elegant frail Robespierre who was all
self-control and deliberation.

How clever and calculating an actor Robespierre was is shown by the
account of his attempted murder by a young girl after the manner of
Marat’s. The attempt failed. The crowd surged up the stairs to his room
to congratulate him. Robespierre was seated in a corner calmly peeling
an orange. Without a word he looked sternly at the intruding crowd,
till in embarrassment they crept away. In his place Danton undoubtedly
would have launched into an impassioned speech of thanks.

Robespierre and his friend St. Just (Fig. 21) are both men of pleasing
appearance--almost good-looking as compared to Danton’s ugly bull-dog
countenance. They were, especially Robespierre, who wore a wig and
sword to the last, neat and even elegant in their dress, which differed
sharply from Danton’s almost gypsy-like effect.

Unfortunately the “Titan”--so accustomed was he to towering above his
opponents in the Convention and pelting them with his Shakespearian
witticisms--underestimated his puny but quick-witted and accurate
opponent, Robespierre, and before he realized it, he had met his doom.
Just as Danton was about to mitigate the rigours of the Convention’s
procedure, just as he hoped to take things a bit more easily
personally, came his impeachment--plotted so subtly by Robespierre and
his helper St. Just that there was no escape. So desperate a fight did
the giant put up, however, for himself and his friends that it hung by
a thread that his accusers might find themselves ruined in his stead.
After a number of most dubious witnesses had testified against Danton,
St. Just felt it wiser to deny him all defence by having the Court
decide that anyone who conducted himself so offensively toward his
judges as Danton, could be condemned without further hearing. Danton’s
mere presence was enough to dismay the jury, who, moreover, were not
really convinced of his guilt. When they retired, a rumor went about
that he had been acquitted. His accusers, thereupon, rushed to the
jury room and forced the rebellious members to submission. It is here
that our artist, who was a devoted admirer of Robespierre, appears
in no favorable light. He pressed about the jury with other members
of the Convention, and the report runs, called out to those who were
still hesitating, “Do you still believe Danton innocent? Has he not
already been judged by public opinion? Only cowards could so conduct
themselves!” What a fine argument!! One member of the jury burst
into sobs, and, as he could not bring himself to vote for Danton’s
impeachment, he was asked: “Who is more useful to the Republic,
Robespierre or Danton?” “Robespierre,” replied the juryman sobbing.
“Then Danton must go to the guillotine,” was the response.

Then came the day of the execution with its procession of three wagons,
each bearing five or six condemned prisoners, and towering above
them all, Danton looking proudly over the heads of the throng. The
procession passed the little Café de Parnasse where, once upon a time,
he had met his Gabrielle; then the Café de la Regence, and whom did
he see there? It is hard to believe. There sat his former friend, the
traitorous David, busily making a drawing of him (perhaps the drawing
in the museum at Lille, Fig. 17). “Lackey!” Danton called to him in
scorn. Next, as the procession passed Robespierre’s house, Danton
called out, “You will soon follow me! Your house will be torn down, and
men will cast salt upon the earth where it stood.”

Danton tried to the last to cheer the friends around him--the
ordinarily merry Camille Desmoulins who was grieving over his bride,
Lucille; the poet Fabre, who affirmed that one of his accusers, who
was also a poet, would doubtless steal his unprinted manuscripts and
publish them under his own name. “Soon that will no longer worry you,”
said Danton to him. The executions were quickly under way. The sun
was setting, and Danton’s giant figure was silhouetted darkly against
the evening sky. One of his friends wanted to embrace him but the
executioner would not permit it. He wanted to finish his task before
sundown. “Idiot,” said Danton to him, “Will you be able to prevent
our heads from kissing each other in the basket?” For one moment he
flinched when he thought of his young wife, “My beloved, shall I never
see you again?” Then, with an effort, he exclaimed, “Come Danton, let
there be no weakness,” and to the executioner, “Show my head to the
people. It is worth it.” These were his last words.

The curse uttered by Danton as he passed Robespierre’s house was
fulfilled all too quickly. Before five months were up, Robespierre trod
the same path, and the wagon was halted before his house to let the
deposed Dictator see the mob in its fury sprinkling his door with the
blood of a slaughtered ox.

And now the earth began to tremble under David’s feet. He was to the
last a devoted adherent of Robespierre. When the latter on the eve of
his fall read to the Jacobins his defence which ended with the words,
“I am ready to drink the poisoned cup,” David cried out “We will drink
it with you.” He must have been thinking of his portrayal of the death
of Socrates, but he probably hardly realized how imminent was the fall
of the last great leader of the revolution and how very nearly he
himself was involved in that fall.

David, as we know, did not complete his painting of Bara. This was
because he was planning for the Convention a festival in honor of the
fallen drummer boy. He was a great master in the arrangement of such
celebrations. With their carefully designed costumes, massed choirs,
improvised statues and profusion of flowers and patriotic orations,
they must have been astonishingly impressive, comparable only to the
national festivals of the Roman Empire. Unfortunately these artistic
manifestations of the revolution, which constituted an appreciable
part of David’s life work, were in their nature transitory. David
had set the date of the Bara festival for the 10th Thermidor (July
26, 1794). This was the very day of Robespierre’s downfall, and his
execution took place two days later. Through this coincidence of
date--or had David been warned?--he did not attend the sitting of the
Convention on the 10th Thermidor. Had he done so, he would undoubtedly
have been arrested and guillotined with Robespierre’s other adherents.

When he came into the Convention hall three days later he was denounced
by André Dumont and obliged to defend himself. He probably believed the
end had come. He was no orator, and his defect of speech made things
still harder for him. He stood there, pale and fearful, and it is said
a nervous perspiration so dewed his forehead that it dripped down his
coat to the floor. Where now was the courage with which he had offered
to die with Robespierre; with which when Marat was attacked in the
Convention he had once exclaimed: “Kill me in his place!” Yes, it was
undoubtedly easier to make drawings of one’s enemies and former friends
on their road to the guillotine than to defend one’s life before a
tribunal of the people. He made so pitiful an impression that they let
him go. Two days later, however, it was thought wiser to arrest him.
At first his sentence was light and he was allowed to work, but soon,
after another stormy session of the Convention, he was transferred to
the Luxembourg. His imprisonment lasted five months. Toward the end,
conditions were again made easier and he was allowed to work. Then he
was set free, and again, this time at the instigation of his fellow
artists, imprisoned for months. Finally during the general amnesty at
the end of the year 1795 he again obtained his freedom. This was the
end of his political activities. The terrible months of uncertainty
during his imprisonment, when death so often stared him in the face,
must have been a time of spiritual growth for him, for they resulted in
his painting a marvellous series of portraits. His achievement at this
time, and during the following years when the revolution slowly ebbed,
is the greatest of his artistic career.

[Illustration: FIG. 23. WOMAN OF THE REVOLUTION (1795)

_Museum, Lyon_]

[Illustration: FIG. 24. NAPOLEON AS FIRST CONSUL (1797)

_Private Possession, Paris_]

There is first of all a portrait depicting the artist at the period of
his imprisonment (Fig. 22). It is seldom that a self portrait expresses
so vividly the perplexities of a period of terror as do the haunted
eyes of this young fanatic. These eyes have been called evil, and
David himself described as a good artist but an evil man. The moral
equipment of the revolutionaries cannot be summarized in such simple
fashion, however. David’s political opponents hit nearer the mark when
they called him to the defence of Marat, “What does that prove so
far as Marat is concerned? Only the devotion of an honorable man who
is allowing himself to be carried away by excitement.” That David’s
political life was so passionate, may be due in part to the youthful
violence of his friends. Nearly all the revolutionary leaders were in
their early thirties, an age which is apt to be the stormy period of
a man’s life. Old people do not bring about revolutions. David, to be
sure, was forty at the time of its outbreak, but see how youthful he
still looked; and the unspent store of his strength is proved by the
great age to which he lived.

He painted another important work during his imprisonment--a little
landscape of the Luxembourg Gardens as seen from his window (now in
the Louvre), one of the first modern realistic landscapes which seem
to foreshadow Courbet’s efforts. The eighteenth-century conception
of landscape was very different. The landscapes were like theatrical
scenery, built up with carefully divided “wings.” Here, for the first
time, a French artist dared to paint an unpromising bit of earth
exactly as he saw it, with all nature’s accidental qualities. A garden
fence in the middle runs diagonally across the picture, while over in
one corner is an avenue of trees which should conventionally have been
in the center of the canvas--no planned symmetrical construction, no
coulisses in the foreground. Here, too, was a break with tradition--a
new beginning.

The two portraits of Monsieur and Madame Seriziat (Figs. 18 and 19),
painted by David while he was still under arrest, are particularly
illuminating as regards his personality. How could an artist, above
whose head the sword of Damocles still hung, paint such sunny and
optimistic portraits? We would, in fact, appreciate only one side
of David if we think of him always as the stern Roman, never as the
light-hearted Frenchman. From the beginning to the end of his artistic
career, side by side with his classic compositions and his moving
revolutionary portrayals (Fig. 23), he painted a series of charming
portraits which prove that through all the horrors of the revolution
he never lost his Gallic light-heartedness or his feeling for grace.
At the beginning of the series stands the pleasing portrait of Vigée
LeBrun, painted in 1793, and at the end, the famous portrait of Madame
Recamier painted in 1800. In these works there is still an echo of
eighteenth century elegance, a trace of that esprit and glamour which
always distinguishes the best of French art. Yet the forms, the simple
outlines, the wide empty spaces of the background and the flatness of
the treatment is wholly new. And besides in these portraits we find
for the first time representations of the Bourgeoisie which replace
those of the aristocracy of the eighteenth century and whose best types
became henceforth the patrons of art which in former days the courts
had been.

[Illustration: FIG. 25. PORTRAIT OF VIGÉE LEBRUN (1793)

_Museum, Rouen_]

[Illustration: FIG. 26. MADAME RECAMIER (1800)

_Louvre, Paris_]

[Illustration: FIG. 27. INGRES AS A BOY (_c._ 1795)

_Private Collection, Paris_]

Scarcely a year had passed since David’s escape from prison when
his freedom was again endangered by the royalist youth who believed
that the moment of reaction had arrived. But now there appeared in
his studio one day--this was at the end of 1796--an officer sent
by General Bonaparte who asked in his name whether he would accept
an offer of safety with his army in Italy. It is evidence of the
extraordinary farsightedness of Napoleon that his feelers extended
everywhere--wherever there might be future support for his power.
But David did not accept the offer: not that he had not at once
recognized in Bonaparte his coming greatness--in fact he already
called him his “hero”--for David’s instinct was in this respect just
as unerring as was Bonaparte’s--but that he had most likely promised
himself, as a result of the terrible experience of the last years,
to no longer become embroiled in political affairs. Napoleon’s
political position was at this time not yet assured, he did not give
up the idea of tempting our artist. When he returned from Italy he
called at his studio for the first time and wished to be painted.
His restless spirit, however, could endure only one sitting. The
wonderful sketch which resulted (Fig. 24) is still in existence and
proves that Bonaparte knew what he was about when he desired David to
become the blazoner of his coming power. No artist has given us from
the very beginning so idealized a conception of his personality. The
breadth of the design in this unfinished composition; the noble verve
of the position; the dauntlessness of expression: everything was in
keeping with the great historical style that Napoleon himself might
have dreamed of. A few weeks later David received an invitation from
Napoleon to accompany him on his Egyptian campaign. Again the artist
refused although he had already entirely succumbed to the personality
of the great general. When Napoleon returned from Egypt he visited
David frequently and flattered him by taking him around Paris and
talking over with him his plans for beautifying the city. At the end
David fell completely under the influence of the stronger personality,
as had happened before in the case of Marat and Robespierre. And in
the same degree that Napoleon’s personality was more powerful than
that of the revolutionaries, his influence was the more crushing.
Only in this way can we account for the fact that the one-time
revolutionary-champion of democratic ideals became at the end
the court painter of the emperor. But this was not to the advantage
of David’s art. So long as Napoleon had not yet reached the height of
his power--that is until about 1800--our artist succeeded in producing
several imposing compositions in honor of the First Consul, especially
the famous portrait on horseback, where he is shown ascending the
Alps, symbolically representing his rise to the highest heights of
glory--certainly an extraordinary translation of a still living and
even young personage into the realm of the ideal and of history. But
when Napoleon had become emperor and David his none too carefully
treated servant, his art became weaker and weaker from year to year,
the while his compositions grew larger in size. When after the downfall
of the emperor and the return of the Bourbons he left France in exile
and settled in Brussels, where he lived until the year 1824, he still
attracted the attention of the world through his many pupils and
admirers, though his art now belonged to the past.

David belongs with the few artists who are mentioned not only in the
history of art but also in political history--perhaps a doubtful
advantage, for preoccupation with two so conflicting fields as art and
politics, was only possible through the sacrifice of one or the other.
Indeed David as politician lived only in the shadow of the greater
ones. In the field of art he was at his best when his political ideas
did not tempt him too much toward abstract themes--that is to say,
in portraiture, when he had the model before him. As a human being
his forte lay in a highly sensitive response to the most intense
intellectual and emotional currents of his time. Since, during the
greater part of his lifetime, these currents were not primarily of an
artistic nature, his art could not always take advantage of them.

This too intense interest in the great events of the day was perhaps
his weak point: the fact that he submitted too easily to the ephemeral
demands of his contemporaries, preferring the fortune of a successful
present to the glory which the future reserves only for the highest
aims and the complete renunciation of the demands of the day. From his
earliest years David had the critics on his side, and the steady stream
of admirers that had gathered about him showed no decrease, remaining
with him even in the most dangerous periods of his life. How different
did it fare with one of his really great contemporaries--Beethoven--who
throughout his life had to contend with uncomprehending critics, but
who is quoted as having said in this connection, “Damn me as much as
you like; you are not able to damn me into eternity.” Just as to the
great ones is given as a recompense for the misunderstanding of their
day the consciousness of their own value to the future, so the artist
who is glorified in his own time knows his own limitations. David
said himself that many of his own works such as the Brutus no longer
had a living value. It was his bad fortune that he was in too close
contact with the affairs of the revolution, for the greatest art (we
return here to our introductory remarks) cannot arise in the midst of
bloodshed. There can be no doubt of where the unattached and eternal
art lay during David’s period, when we call to mind the poetry of
Goethe or the music of Beethoven. The centers where the greatest poet
and the greatest musician of the days of the revolution lived--Weimar
and Vienna--were far removed from the theater of the struggle, just as
Rembrandt’s art flowered outside the scene of the Thirty Years War.
From a distance the deafening war clangor permeated into the quiet
worlds of these rulers in the realm of art; from a distance through
transfiguring light appeared to them the new ideas for which the
struggle was waged. Such should be the milieu where the greatest art
is born--impregnated with the shower of the newly created ideas, but
quietly and not to such a degree that its own existence is imperilled.

This chance for perspective also makes it possible for the really great
artist to judge worldly matters more clearly than the one who lives
in the midst of the fray. How much more impartially, for instance,
did Beethoven, who otherwise did not care for politics, judge the
events of the times than David, who worried about them half his
lifetime! Beethoven, also, like the best of his contemporaries, was
democratically inclined and applauded the new revolutionary ideas. When
Napoleon became First Consul he recognized his greatness and desired
to celebrate in his music the hero who had brought the revolution to
completion. He began his great symphony, the “Eroica,” and wrote upon
the title page the name of Bonaparte next to his own. When the news was
brought to him that Napoleon had crowned himself emperor, indignant
that his illusions had been dispelled and that Bonaparte had become as
tyrannical as the crowned heads which the revolution had deposed, he
tore up the dedication and began the symphony anew, ending it with the
funeral march.

The fascination of the art and the personality of David lies in the
fact that they reflect the period of the greatest intellectual and
social upheaval of his nation--an upheaval such as comes to every
nation once in its history, with such a force that through it the
whole world is shaken. In such moments of history creations of
centuries collapse at one blow. The foundations of faith and of morals
waver; the ties of family and friendship are torn apart and even the
customary tasks of the day, under other circumstances serving as an
anchor alike to the weak and the strong, appear useless and cease:
like the flood of the terrific storm which engulfs us, rudely tearing
away from the strongest the guiding of their own fate, and forcing
the slothful into the maelstrom of the higher general will. What
remains for the individual who, hesitating, stands at the edge of the
precipice, viewing the tragic drama? Can he do better than to plunge
into the stream, keeping afloat as best he may?

Happy the one who in such periods succeeds like our artist in
preserving so much of his own identity that from out the history of
this chaos his name still rings with vibrant life.




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FOOTNOTES


[1] The picture is not dated, but since the portrait of Madame de
Verninac which is almost identical in composition is dated 1799, it is
most likely executed shortly thereafter.

[2] The figure studies in this sketchbook are interesting from another
point of view (compare Fig. 10, a study of a beggar closely related
to the composition of the Belisarius, although later in date). They
prove clearly the endeavour of David to replace by his own the
eighteenth-century style of drawing as he had learned it in the Boucher
school. Instead of modelling the figures through diagonal parallel
lines, indicating the shadows and neglecting the outlines, he tries to
produce the effect of plasticity through clearly connected outlines
alone, leaving out the modelling entirely. In this respect also David
is the predecessor of artists of the most modern school. He developed
his style of drawing in connection with his studies after Roman
sculptures and was strongly influenced in his method of designing by
a young French sculptor, Lamarie, whom he met in Rome. (See Charles
Saunier: _Louis David_, p. 16.)

[3] Illustrated in the excellent biography of David by Léon Rosenthal
in the series: _Les Maitres de l’Art_, p. 30.

[4] _Briefe aus der französischen Revolution_, edited by G. Landauer,
1922.

[5] Reproduced in Charles Saunier, _David_, p. 44 and 48.

[6] The best book on the subject is by Pierre de Nolhac, _La Reine
Marie Antoinette_, Paris.

[7] Reproduced in the book on Danton by Louis Madelin (Paris, 1914).
The following pages are based upon this excellent biography.




Transcriber’s Notes


Punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling were made consistent when a
predominant preference was found in the original book; otherwise they
were not changed.

Simple typographical errors were corrected; unbalanced quotation
marks were remedied when the change was obvious, and otherwise left
unbalanced.

Illustrations in this eBook have been positioned between paragraphs
and outside quotations. In versions of this eBook that support
hyperlinks, the page references in the List of Illustrations lead to
the corresponding illustrations.

In the original book, two groups of illustrations were printed
side-by-side on the same page and not in numeric sequence. In this
eBook, they may be displayed side-by-side or one below the other, in
the same sequence as in the original book.


Footnotes, originally at the bottoms of the pages that referenced them,
have been collected, sequentially renumbered, and placed at the end of
the book.



*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 75887 ***