Paris_ The Collected Traveler - Barrie Kerper [180]
The painting received rave reviews at the Louvre’s annual Salon, opening just weeks within the 1789 storming of the Bastille. In the months that followed, its main theme—of measuring the interests of a society against those of an individual—was no longer a remote concern for ancient Roman leaders. Parisians subsequently adopted David’s Brutus as a heroic antiroyalist, the kind of dutiful father to the nation that France needed. It is doubtful, however, that David’s original client for the painting, the king himself, saw Brutus the same way. It was one of Louis XVI’s last acquisitions before the entire royal collection was seized by the new government.
David’s technique was by far the most Revolutionary aspect of his painting. He developed an austere neoclassical style that could be grasped immediately by the throngs visiting the Salon, held in the Louvre’s still-crowded Salon Carré. The grace and delicacy of Watteau might be lost in this shuffle, but David’s crisp lines guaranteed his painting maximum visibility. His figures’ pantomime of gestures—Brutus’s tight clutch on the letter revealing his sons’ treachery versus his wife’s mournfully extended arm—magnifies their emotional conflict across the space of a noisy gallery (the effect still works today). David wanted his paintings to speak directly to a motley Parisian public. It was, arguably, an audience that painters were thinking about for the very first time in history.
Parisian women were soon emulating Roman fashion, wearing the same corset-free looser shifts with high-waisted belts as the women in Brutus. David’s nearby Portrait of Madame Récamier (1800) is an excellent example of this Parisian fashion à l’antique. Brutus helped launch a taste for Roman-inspired furniture, too. Jacob Frères began their careers by creating historical replicas for David to paint (he was a stickler for accurate interiors in his paintings). Later, they would produce similar Empire-style furniture for Napoléon I.
David was not just setting fashion and decorating trends in Paris, however. He played an active role in the new government. As elected deputy to the Convention, he voted for the execution of his former royal patron. Since his radical ideas had failed to win him many friends at the Royal Academy of Painting, when the new government put him in charge of it, he had it abolished. He organized more egalitarian salons open to submission from all artists. David was also given the job of glorifying Revolutionary martyrs in paint, and organizing government-sponsored pageants—like the Festival of the Supreme Being in 1794—which transformed Paris into a stage set of patriotic spectacle.
All of this Revolutionary handiwork got him into serious trouble during the post-Terror crackdown. David was arrested and briefly imprisoned at the Palais du Luxembourg. While in his prison room, he painted a self-portrait, which the Louvre now owns as well. Although promising to follow principles rather than men from now on in, David began painting for Napoléon in 1798, just a year shy of the coup d’état that would make him, like Brutus, first consul of France. The work that now draws David’s biggest crowds at the Louvre is his Coronation, a marvelous piece of Napoleonic propaganda that signals both the end of David’s radical challenges to his audience and the return of absolutist power to Paris.
One can imagine why later generations of Parisian artists might want to steer clear of politics and power, and focus more on the act of painting itself. By Auguste Renoir’s time, the Impressionists weren’t interested