It is the fashion to think of David as the painter of the Revolution and
the Empire. Really he is Louis Seize. Historical critics say that he had
no fewer than four styles, but apart from obvious labels they would be
puzzled to tell to which of these styles any individual picture of his
belongs. He was from the beginning extremely, perhaps absurdly,
enamoured of the antique, and we usually associate addiction to the
antique with the Revolutionary period. But perhaps politics are slower
than the æsthetic movement; David's view of art and practice of painting
were fixed unalterably under the reign of philosophism. Philosophism, as
Carlyle calls it, is the ruling spirit of his work. Long before the
Revolution--in 1774--he painted what is still his most characteristic
picture--"The Oath of the Horatii." His art developed and grew
systematized under the Republic and the Empire; but Napoleon, whose
genius crystallized the elements of everything in all fields of
intellectual effort with which he occupied himself, did little but
formally "consecrate," in French phrase, the art of the painter of "The
Oath of the Horatii" and the originator and designer of the "Fête" of
Robespierre's "Être Suprême." Spite of David's subserviency and that of
others, he left painting very much where he found it. And he found it in
a state of reaction against the Louis Quinze standards. The break with
these, and with everything _régence_, came with Louis Seize, Chardin
being a notable exception and standing quite apart from the general
drift of the French æsthetic movement; and Greuze being only a
pseudo-romanticist, and his work a variant of, rather than reactionary
from, the artificiality of his day. Before painting could "return to
nature," before the idea and inspiration of true romanticism could be
born, a reaction in the direction of severity after the artificial yet
irresponsible riot of the Louis Quinze painters was naturally and
logically inevitable. Painting was modified in the same measure with
every other expression in the general _recueillement_ that followed the
extravagance in all social and intellectual fields of the Louis Quinze
epoch. But in becoming more chaste it did not become less classical.
Indeed, so far as severity is a trait of classicality--and it is only an
associated not an essential trait of it--painting became more classical.
It threw off its extravagances without swerving from the artificial
character of its inspiration. Art in general seemed content with
substituting the straight line for the curve--a change from Louis Quinze
to Louis Seize that is very familiar even to persons who note the
transitions between the two epochs only in the respective furniture of
each; a Louis Quinze chair or mirror, for example, having a flowing
outline, whereas a Louis Seize equivalent is more rigid and rectilinear.
David is artificial, it is to be pointed out, only in his _ensemble_. In
detail he is real enough. And he always has an _ensemble_. His
compositions, as compositions, are admirable. They make a total
impression, and with a vigor and vividness that belong to few
constructed pictures. The canvas is always penetrated with
David--illustrates as a whole, and with completeness and comparative
flawlessness, his point of view, his conception of the subject. This, of
course, is the academic point of view, the academic conception. But, as
I say, his detail is surprisingly truthful and studied. His
picture--which is always nevertheless a picture--is as inconceivable, as
traditional in its inspiration, as factitious as you like; his figures
are always sapiently and often happily exact. His portraits are
absolutely vital characterizations. And in general his sculptural sense,
his self-control, his perfect power of expressing what he deemed worth
expressing, are really what are noteworthy in his pictures, far more
than their monotonous coloration and the coldness and unreality of the
pictures themselves, considered as moving, real, or significant
compositions. In admiration of these it is impossible for us nowadays to
go as far as even the romanticist, though extremely catholic, Gautier.
They leave us cold. We have a wholly different ideal, which in order to
interest us powerfully painting must illustrate--an ideal of more
pertinence and appositeness to our own moods and manner of thought and
feeling.
Ingres, a painter of considerably less force, I think, comes much nearer
to doing this. He is more elastic, less devoted to system. Without being
as free, as sensitive to impressions as we like to see an artist of his
powers, he escapes pedantry. His subject is not "The Rape of the
Sabines," but "The Apotheosis of Homer," academic but not academically
fatuitous. To follow the inspiration of the Vatican Stanze in the
selection and treatment of ideal subjects is to be far more closely in
touch with contemporary feeling as to what is legitimate and proper in
imaginative painting, than to pictorialize an actual event with a
systematic artificiality and conformity to abstractions that would
surely have made the sculptor of the Trajan column smile. Yet I would
rather have "The Rape of the Sabines" within visiting distance than "The
Apotheosis of Homer." It is better, at least solider, painting. The
painter, however dominated by his theory, is more the master of its
illustration than Ingres is of the justification of his admiration for
Raphael. The "Homer" attempts more, but it is naturally not as
successful in getting as effective a unity out of its greater
complexity. It is in his less ambitious pictures that the genius of
Ingres is unmistakably evident--his heads, his single figures, his
exquisite drawings almost in outline. His "Odalisque" of the Louvre is
not as forceful as David's portrait of Madame Récamier, but it is a
finer thing. I should like the two to have changed subjects in this
instance. His "Source" is beautifully drawn and modelled. In everything
he did distinction is apparent. Inferior assuredly to David when he
attempted the grand style, he had a truer feeling for the subtler
qualities of style itself. All his works are linearly beautiful
demonstrations of his sincerity--his sanity indeed--in proclaiming that
drawing is "the probity of art."
With a few contemporary painters and critics, whose specific penetration
is sometimes in curious contrast with their imperfect catholicity, he
has recently come into vogue again, after having been greatly neglected
since the romantic outburst. But he belongs completely to the classic
epoch. Neither he nor his refined and sympathetic pupil, Flandrin, did
aught to pave the way for the modern movement. Intimations of the
shifting point of view are discoverable rather in a painter of far
deeper poetic interest than either, spite of Ingres's refinement and
Flandrin's elevation--in Prudhon. Prudhon is the link between the last
days of the classic supremacy and the rise of romanticism. Like Claude,
like Chardin, he stands somewhat apart; but he has distinctly the
romantic inspiration, constrained and regularized by classic principles
of taste. He is the French Correggio in far more precise parallelism
than Lesueur is the French Raphael. With a grace and lambent color all
his own--a beautiful mother-of-pearl and opalescent tone underlying his
exquisite violets and graver hues; a color-scheme, on the one hand, and
a sense of design in line and mass more suave and graceful than anything
since the great Italians, on the other--he recalls the lovely
chiaro-oscuro of the exquisite Parmesan as it is recalled in no other
modern painter. Occupying, as incontestably he does, his own niche in
the pantheon of painters, he nevertheless illustrates most distinctly
and unmistakably the slipping away of French painting from classic
formulas as well as from classic extravagance, and the tendency to new
ideals of wider reach and greater tolerance--of more freedom,
spontaneity, interest in "life and the world"--of a definitive break
with the contracting and constricting forces of classicism. During its
next period, and indeed down to the present day, French painting will
preserve the essence of its classic traditions, variously modified from
decade to decade, but never losing the quality in virtue of which what
is French is always measurably the most classic thing going; but of this
next period certainly Prudhon is the precursor, who, with all his
classic serenity, presages its passion for "storms, clouds, effusion,
and relief."