Jacques Louis David was the painter, revolutionary my younger daughter chose for her upcoming history paper on the French Revolution. She’d asked and I gave her a mini-lecture on what I could recall of that pivotal axis. Was it two year back now that I read Carlyle’s The French Revolution, a History, A Tale of Two Cities and Chateaubriands’ “Tales From Beyond the Grave.” But unlike the clear pivot of something like the America Revolution or the Russian Revolution, the French Revolution defies easy summary.
The March edition of the ‘The New York Review of Books” had a review by Lynn Hunt concerning Napoleon’s War’s and a new history of the French Revolution. I found the following sentence from the review’s opening paragraph to be breath taking:
“The cascade of events between 1789 and Napoleon’s final defeat in 1815 gave birth to much of what we know as modern politics: revolution as a leap into the future,, “right” and “left” as political markers, the notion of universal human rights, the extension of voting rights to most men, the “emancipation” of the Jews, the first successful slave revolt and the first abolition of slavery not to mention the use of terror as an instrument of government and guerrilla warfare as a tactic of resistance, along with the police state, authoritarianism, and the cult of personality as ways of circumventing democratic aspirations.”
Phew.
I bought my daughter a few different books ranging from easy to difficult about the French Revolution in general and her heretofore to me, largely unrecognized subject, Jacques Louis David. I secured a book of prints arranged my Mari Pietcheva “Jacques Louis David 229 Colour Plates,” which are lovely to gaze upon and consider but are not accompanied by much substantive text. “Jacques Louis David, Revolutionary Artist” by Warren Roberts was a proper biography which I decided to read today after reading my daughter’s first draft of the work.
And while I’ve been familiar, certainly with the 'Death of Marat', I don’t think I knew much of anything about him nor the movement of his day to consider and paint towards the virtue of Rome, before diving wholeheartedly into the revolution as a Jacobin. A close friend of Robespierre and Marat, the signer of execution warrants, the painter of the revolution, it is astounding that he escaped with his head to reinvent himself as a reluctant court painter for Napoleon, championing the ideas historical thrust now of Greece until he as exiled from his native land during the second Bourbon restoration and lived out his final days under British rule in Belgium:
“David took a certain pride in his position as a political exile: After the Duke of Wellington had tried to have him expelled from Brussels he asked the artist to do his portrait David’s refusal made Wellington furious David’s comment about the portrait he had been asked to paint was “I would rather stab myself with a sword than paint an Englishman. “
Politics and ideological stridency tends to have the best of most artists after a time. Perhaps the most intimate loadstar for me is when I consider the life and the art of John Lennon , how risky and incandescent he burned on “Some Time In New York.” And how it seemed to leave him empty, not long thereafter. David was more than a mere commentator on the Revolution, he was an active agent and that he survived the terror at all is remarkable, all the more so that he was so capable at reinventing himself during the unlikely rise of Napoleon which was one hundred and eighty degrees the opposite marching orders of the Jacobins, though he was more judicious about keeping distance the second time around.
In the end, I suppose I felt said for David. He struggles with Napoleon and his minions and other officials to simply be paid. They try to stiff him for his work and it all feels rather beneath him. He winds down his life till the age of seventy-seven in exile. He still wants to lead the school of French painters, but his students, as students always must, were leaving him behind.
Wednesday, 5/27/20
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