The boudoir art of the _ancien régime_ came to a natural end through
the great social upheaval of the Revolution, of which Jacques Louis
David (1748-1825) is the very personification in the realm of painting.
As a pupil of Boucher, David in his early years was essentially a child
of the eighteenth century. That he became the founder and head of a
new classicist school, as tyrannical in his sway as had been Le Brun
during the reign of Louis XIV., was due to the teaching of Joseph Marie
Vien, whom he accompanied to Rome in 1775, the year in which Vien was
appointed Director of the École de Rome. Vien was an eclectic and a
purist of greater ability than would appear from his two dull pictures
at the Louvre, _St. Germain and St. Vincent_ (No. 964) and _The
Sleeping Hermit_ (No. 965).
David’s participation in the events of the year 1789 and his ardent
republicanism did not, as has often been stated, attract him to
subjects from Republican Roman history. Indeed, he had already painted
_The Oath of the Horatii_ (No. 189) and _The Lictors taking to Brutus
the Corpse of his Sons_ (No 191), for Louis XVI., and was only
following the current of taste in devoting himself to the study of the
antique and to antiquarian research. These two pictures, in spite of
their cold classicism and theatricality, met with sensational success
on their first appearance at the Salon. It is not in such works as
these, nor in the _Rape of the Sabine Women_ (No. 188), compared with
which even Poussin’s version of the same theme appears like a glimpse
of actual life, that David’s talent found its happiest expression, but
in the unaffected and irresistibly charming _Portrait of Mme. Récamier_
(No. 199, Plate XLV.) reclining on an Empire sofa. Whatever this
picture may owe to the sitter’s grace and beauty and to the fact that
it was never finished, and thus retained the freshness of a sketch,
it is certainly one of the most attractive masterpieces of the French
school. Here, as in the group of _Three Ladies of Ghent_ (No. 200A),
in which the luminous quality of the fresh tones is enhanced by the
general greyness of the scheme, we have the work of a real painter,
whilst David’s bombastic historical compositions are scarcely more than
tinted cartoons.