The French Revolution And Its Influence On Art

(via The Outline of Art) William Orpen writes:

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How great was the influence of David on the painters of his generation is revealed by the tragic story of Antoine Jean Gros (1771-1835), who killed himself because he thought he was bringing disgrace on the tradition of his master. Gros entered David’s studio in 1785, and though he was unsuccessful when he tried for the Prix de Rome in 1792, in the following year his master helped him to get a passport for Italy, and so Gros got as far as Genoa, where in 1790 he made the acquaintance of Josephine, afterwards Empress. Josephine carried him off to Milan and presented him to Bonaparte, who took a liking to the young man, attached him to his staff, and allowed him to paint that wonderful portrait, now in the Louvre, of ‘Napolean at Arcole,’ which is the most haunting and poetic of all the many portraits of the Emperor.

Thenceforward the career of Gros was outwardly a series of triumphs. Owing to his experiences in Italy—where, in 1799, he was besieged with the French army at Genoa—he had a closer acquaintance with the realities of war than any of his artist contemporaries.

In Genoa and elsewhere Gros had made a particular study of the work of Rubens and Vandyck, and in his canvases he now endeavored to emulate the opulent color of the Flemish School. Consequently his battle-pictures were so informed with knowledge and inspired by feeling and fine color that they aroused high enthusiasm in Paris. When His picture ‘Les Pestiférés de Jaffa’ was shown in the Salon of 1804, all the young artists of the day combined to hand a wreath on the frame in honor of the life, truth, and color in the work of Gros.

Already there was a beginning of a reaction in Paris against the ascetic Classicism of David, and while Gros, as an old pupil of that master, still commanded the respect of the classicists, his spirited renderings of contemporary events pleased the younger generation who were later to give birth to the Romanticists. Thus, for a time, Gros pleased both camps in painting, and his position was unimpaired when Napoleon fell and the Bourbons were restored. In 1816 he was made a member of the Institute, he was commissioned to decorate the cupola of the Panthéon, and in 1824, on the completion of this work, he was created a Baron.

Meanwhile David, exciled in Brussels, was uneasy about the style of his former pupil, whom, on leaving Paris, he had left in charge of the Classical Movement. From Brussels he wrote constantly to Gros, begging him to cease painting ‘these futile subjects and circumstantial pictures’ and to devote his talent to ‘fine historical pictures’. By this David meant, not those paintings of the battles of Aboukir, Eylau, the Pyramids, etc., which were fine historical pictures, but paintings depicting some incident in the history of Greece or Rome. These alone, according to David, were the fit themes for a noble art, and he could not accept the renderings of events of his own times as true historical pictures. Unfortunately Gros, in his unbounded veneration for his old master, took David very seriously. He saw with alarm that the younger generation of painters were departing from the classical tradition and heading for Romanticism, and he blamed himself for leading them astray.

In the very year when he was made a Baron, his fellow pupil, Girodet (1767-1824), died, and at the funeral of this follower of David, Gros lamented the loss of a great classic artist, saying: ‘For myself, not only have I not enough authority to direct the school, but I must accuse myself of being one of the first who set the bad example others have followed.’

Conscience-stricken at falling away from his master’s ideals, and particularly so when David died in the following year, Baron Gros now did violence to his own talent by forcing himself to paint subjects of which David would have approved. While the truth of his war pictures had shocked the Classic School, the artificiality of his new classical pictures roused the mocking laughter of the young and increasingly powerful Romantic School. His ‘Hercules and Diomed’ in the Salon of 1835 was openly sneered at; the younger critics treated him as a ‘dead man,’ till, wearied out and depressed by the disgrace and shame which he thought he had brought on the school of David, poor Baron Gros, on the 25th June 1835, lay down on his face in three feet of water at Meudon, where on the following day two boatmem discovered his body.

That leadership of the Classic School, for which Baron Gros, both by his art and his temperament, was utterly unfitted, was eventually assumed with honor and credit by his junior, Jean Dominique Auguste Ingres (1780-1867). A pupil of David and the winner of the Prix de Rome in 1801, Ingres was not at first regarded as a ‘safe’ classic by the purists of that school. To these pedants, who worshipped hardly any art between the antique and Raphael, Ingres was suspicious because of his loudly proclaimed admiration of the Italian Primitives. On his way to Rome, Ingres had stopped at Pisa to study the frescoes by Benozzo Gozzoli and his contemporaries in the Campo Santo. ‘We ought to copy these men on our knees,’ said the young enthusiasts, and his words were repeated to David, who regarded them an ominous.

The French Revolution And Its Influence On Art (continued)