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I T was the year 1793. The French Revolution had overthrown the government of the King of France. The common people had stood hardships and injustice until they could stand them no longer. Then they had struck .France had been made a republic. The heads of hundreds of people — enemies of the republic — were being cut off. The king and his family had been put in prison. It was voted that they too should lose their heads.
One of the men who voted yes to the question “Shall the king be killed?” was Jacques Louis David. David was a painter. He believed the revolution was right, even though he had been one of the court painters. By court painter we mean the king’s own painter.
Some of the revolutionists had read about the old Roman republic that you have read about in your history books.They liked to think of themselves as strong and brave like the ancient Romans. They liked to think of their republic as like the old Roman republic. So it became the fashion in the revolution to imitate the old Roman heroes. David got the actors in the theaters to wear Roman costumes instead of French clothes. Soon other people were trying to dress like the Romans. They even made their furniture in imitation of Roman furniture. David found that the people wanted Roman pictures, so he painted many pictures of scenes from Roman history.
Nowadays we think that David’s paintings are not so wonderful as the revolutionists thought them. But they are important because they set a style in painting. The old Roman and Greek days are known as the classical times,and so this style that David made so popular is called the Classical style of art. And David and the other Classical style artists said that no other kind of painting was worth doing.They made many rules for painting that they expected all good artists to follow.
David had begun painting pictures of the Romans even before the revolution. One of these paintings is called “The Oath of the Horatii.” If you have read your Roman history carefully you will remember that the Horatii were three brothers who were champion fighters. Rome was at war with another city. Instead of letting the two armies fight,which would have meant the death of many men, each side agreed to pick three fighters and let them fight it out to see which city should win the war. The Romans chose the three brothers, who took a solemn oath to win for Rome or die trying. David’s picture shows them taking this oath.
When the fight was ended, two of the brothers had been killed. But the third one had managed to kill the other three fighters and so to win the war for Rome.
Another famous Roman picture by David shows the women stopping the fight between the Romans and the Sabines by running out between the two battle lines. You will find this picture is used to illustrate many Roman history books.
NO.22-1 THE OATH
David was also a portrait painter. He painted a portrait of a French lady, Madame Récamier, who is shown lying on a couch. The couch is Roman in style and the lady’s dress shows the Roman styles that French women wore then.
After the revolution came Napoleon. Napoleon made himself Emperor of France. David admired Napoleon greatly and painted several pictures of him. He painted him on a rearing horse, crossing the Alps. He painted him being crowned emperor. (Napoleon crowned himself.) He painted him on the battle-field.
But after Napoleon, there came another king — of the same family as the poor king who had lost his head. Naturally,David wasn’t court painter to him — not after having voted for the other king’s death! In fact, David had to run away from France, and he lived in Brussels for the rest of his life.
But the strict rules of the Classical style of art lived on.David had had many pupils and some of them became famous painters, too. One of these pupils was the artist Ingres. Ingres was a wonderful draftsman. That means the lines that he drew were beautifully done. He thought more about the lines in a picture than the color or the light. All Classical painters tried to make the lines and shapes in their pictures more important than the colors. So their colors are dull and lifeless. Ingres is probably best known for his portraits. And the portraits that he drew in pencil and did not paint at all show how great a draftsman he was.
Baron Gros was another pupil of David, and it was too bad that he was, for the Classical pictures he painted, as much as possible following David’s strict rules, were not so successful as those he painted in another style. Gros kept trying to paint great Classical pictures and was brokenhearted when he found he couldn’t do them well. His really fine pictures he thought little of, because they were not about Greeks and Romans. These others are interesting to us because they pictured the events that were taking place then,which Gros painted well because he had seen them.
Napoleon thought it would be a good idea to have a painter with his army. So he made Gros Inspector of Reviews in the army so that the painter could go with the troops and paint the battles. Gros watched the fighting himself, and so he did not paint war as a glorious thing. He showed the heroism of the soldiers, but he showed their terrible suffering too.
Now we come to a French painter who did not believe at all in Classical painting. The strict rules that the Classical painters said all artists should follow made this artist angry. He was Delacroix. Delacroix led a revolt against the Classical style of painting. Painters who thought as Delacroix did were called Romanticists. The Romanticists didn’t see any sense in painting Greeks and Romans. They wanted to paint what was going on in the world at that time. The Romanticists revolted against the Classical style in another way. They believed in color. They thought color was more important than beautiful line drawing.
Of course the Classical painters hated the Romanticists and tried to do all they could to stop them. But Delacroix and his followers became more and more popular and finally they took the place that the Classical artists had once held.
Delacroix painted pictures of the Crusaders, of Bible stories, of the people of Algiers, of the war going on in his time between the Greeks and the Turks (he was all for the Greeks), and of many other subjects. The picture below shows a scene from the Bible. I hope you will see it some day in colors. Delacroix’s drawing was not always as good as that of other artists but his coloring was very good indeed.
NO.22-2 CHRIST IN
One of Delacroix’s paintings is called “Liberty Leading the People.” It is supposed to show a scene in a new French Revolution that took place in 1830 when there was fighting between the people and the soldiers of the king in the streets of Paris. It is a stirring picture, full of action and movement.It has really a double meaning. The Classical style of painting that tried to keep all other ways of painting out of France needed to be overthrown too. And this picture may be thought of as Liberty leading Romantic art against the toostrict rules of Classical art.