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Book review: Jacques-Louis David: Empire to Exile
by:
Martin Terry
Philippe Bordes
Jacques-Louis David: Empire to Exile
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press in association with the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, 2005). 400 pp.
US$75 ISBN: 0300104472
French paintings; the revolutionary decades 1760-1830 was one of the great exhibitions to be staged in Australia. Presented at the Art Gallery of New South Wales and the National Gallery of Victoria in 1980, its centrepiece was Jacques-Louis David's The death of Marat (1793) which, along with The oath of the Horatii (1784) and Madame Recamier (1800) both also by David, are the highlights of French neo-classicism and three of that class of paintings that everybody recognises.
Despite its quality, the 1980 exhibition was not judged a success. Who knows why? Perhaps, back then, it was too thoughtful and cool. Today, twenty-five years later, cool is cool and there is perhaps no better illustration of this than the exhibition Jacques-Louis David; empire to exile, with its many glacially beautiful works, held recently at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles and currently on show at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts. This sumptuous catalogue constitutes the record.
David (1748-1825) was a regicide, but he also persecuted fellow artists, signing for example, the arrest warrant of Hubert Robert (1733-1808); clearly he was an unpleasant fellow. After the fall of Robespierre, he was imprisoned and the first painting in this exhibition, a self-portrait of 1794 painted during his incarceration, has him holding a palette and a brush like loaded weapons.
Many of his early works can't travel, thus the exhibition focuses upon his relationship with the greatest figure of the period, Napoleon Bonaparte, first consul in late 1799, proclaimed emperor in 1804. The curator of the exhibition, Philippe Bordes, asks therefore 'Is the second half of David's career a theme for an exhibition?' On the evidence of this volume, the answer is probably non.
Portraiture-as interesting as it is-predominates, padded-out with too many drawings that aren't the equal of those by the younger Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780-1876). Nevertheless, things begin splendidly with Bonaparte crossing the Alps at Grand-Saint-Bernard (1800-1801). This astonishing picture, one of the great images of political propaganda, is the French Revolution's own Triumph of the Will. It is vainglorious, but who can fail to be caught up in the sheer bravura of it? In fact, the painting was received contemporaneously with some scepticism, one critic complaining that Bonaparte was incorrectly seated in Styrie's saddle and that the nearby soldiers toiling through the snow drifts were like 'flies beneath an elephant'.
Napoleon was a pictorial puzzle. While there was agreement on how to paint a monarch, how should one portray an upstart who had risen on his merits? As a consequence, it's suggested here that 'the images of Napoleon Bonaparte are radically unstable and elusive'. He could shape-shift depending on the circumstances: a man of the people; or the all-conquering hero. At his most alarming, he was portrayed by Ingres as a seated, omnipotent, Jove, a treatment that even Napoleon thought was a bit much. The painting, Napoleon I on his imperial throne (1806), is in that temple to the emperor's memory, the Musee de l'Armee in Paris.
As well as being appointed first painter to Napoleon, David was also art director to the empire. This aspect of his career was covered in some detail in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, exhibition The age of Napoleon in 1989 and is given short shrift here; but in some respects this is his most interesting imperial work. Napoleon had been irked that the national manufactories continued, for instance, to churn out religious or mythological subjects, rather than celebrating 'Those actions ... which have distinguished the army and the nation' and in this extraordinary letter of 1805 he complains of the lack of a 'global vision'- his phrase. Alongside others, notably the rather insinuating Dominique-Vivant Denon (1747-1825), it was David's role to put into effect this new conception of the national arts as an indivisible ensemble.
In 1810 military conquest seemed a matter of history. Now Napoleon sought to present himself as the humane administrator, the theme of a tour de force from David, The emperor in his study at the Tuileries (1812). Turned towards us, this is an intimate view of the soldier-bureaucrat, who in the cause of his country has worked at his desk throughout the night. Now at daybreak, dressed as their colonel, he prepares to ride out and have breakfast with the Foot Grenadiers.
Strangely, this portrait was a commission of the Scottish peer, the Marquess of Douglas and hung at Hamilton Palace in Lanarkshire until the famous sale of 1882. While Professor Bordes suggests that the commission for the painting may have been encouraged by Douglas' new son-in-law, the great Francophile William Beckford, it had been years since Beckford had been in Paris, 'Lucifer's own metropolis'. More interesting, is the air of treason about this commission. The marquess wrote to David, inviting him to 'transfer onto the canvas the features of the Great Man' but, in 1811, the British under Wellington were fighting the French in Spain and Portugal. Perhaps Douglas was dreaming of the Napoleonic liberation of his own homeland from those below the border.
It was not to be. In 1814 there is abdication and Elba and in 1815, Waterloo and St Helena. David and his wife-Marguerite-Charlotte plays a mere cameo in this text-wend their way to Brussels. There, in a cultural backwater, those exiled from France 'waged solitary battles to quench the contradictory desire to remember, to rewrite, to praise, to regret, and to forget.'
There are only about 100 paintings by David; two of them are in Australia, in the collection of James Fairfax. Like David, the subject of one of the Fairfax portraits Dominique-Vincent Ramel de Nogaret had blood on his hands, but that was such a long time ago. Now a fellow exile in Brussels he was a prosperous merchant. The portrait of his wife, Ange-Pauline-Charlotte, is however a more direct and accusatory image, 'overtly militant ... devoid of all nostalgia.'
The emperor died in 1821. A year later David completed a copy of The coronation of Napoleon and Josephine but it was too big, too late. At least he was one who didnￕt choose to forget.
This is a somewhat unwieldy volume. One might say it's rather French in its style and not just the often quirky English. At times, it is rather an essay in search of an exhibition, but by emphasising a lesser-known period of David's life we now have a more balanced view of the artistic contribution of one of France's greatest painters.
Martin Terry |
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