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My previous post on the Wadsworth Atheneum included Rococo porcelain from France and Germany, created in the mid-eighteenth century. This week we move on to works of the French Revolution, which began in 1789. If you enjoy this post, you might want to read my posts on art from 1801-1806 and 1807-1815.

1782: The Duchesse de Polignac Wearing a Straw Hat

The original of this portrait is at the Metropolitan Museum. This copy was made by Vigée Le Brun at the request of Marie Antoinette. The Duchess of Polignac, one of the great beauties of her day, was the queen’s good friend and governess to the royal children. For her portrait, she’s wearing the loose muslin gown that the queen and her ladies preferred, on informal occasions, to the rigors of corsets and hoops. (Note to self: find out how this “shepherdess” costume relates to the sort of empire-waist dress so popular thirty years later, in the Regency period in England, as seen in Bridgerton and innumerable Jane Austen movies.) The duchess and her family fled France after the fall of the Bastille in 1789. She died soon after learning of Marie Antoinette’s execution.

1787: The Storm

Vernet’s preferred subjects were nature at her extremes. Here, a ship is wrecked and survivors struggle to stay afloat, while those on the shore watch in horror. A similar example by Vernet is at the National Gallery in London.

Vernet (b. 1714) lived for twenty years in Rome, absorbing Italian views on landscape and creating paintings that were popular with English aristocrats on the Grand Tour. (This was the same market – a large and wealthy market! – that Canaletto painted for.) In 1753 Vernet returned to Paris, where he spent the rest of his career. Despite the apparent foreboding in this 1787 painting, Vernet died the year of the French Revolution … peacefully in his bed.

1789 or later: The Lictors Bringing Brutus the Bodies of His Sons

In 509 BC, Lucius Junius Brutus helped expel the last king of Rome, Tarquinius Superbus. When two of Brutus’s sons conspired to reinstate the Tarquin monarchy, he ordered them executed. Here Roman officials bring the bodies of the sons home; Brutus contemplates the effects of his orders as his family wails with grief. Brutus was regarded as a hero who chose to maintain the newly founded Roman Republic no matter the cost to himself. The original of David’s very large painting (10 x 13 feet) was displayed at the Paris Salon in 1789, when the French Revolution had already begun. It was purchased for the Louvre that year. This smaller copy was done by one of David’s studio assistants or followers.

Jacques-Louis David, trained in the Rococo style, was the originator of Neoclassical painting in France and its best exponent. The new style harked back to the severe and dignified mood of the Roman Republic, with noble and heroic figures determined to suffer and die if necessary to defend their principles. To emphasize the Republican setting, David incorporated details of ancient Roman costume, furniture, and architecture that were modeled on recent archeological excavations in Italy. David’s own contribution (seldom evident in other Neoclassicists) was a sense for drama and emotional impact. Here he created that impact via the contrast between the upright, stoic men and the huddle of wailing women.

David was an active supporter of the French Revolution, and a friend and ally of Robespierre. After Robespierre’s execution in 1794, David aligned himself with Napoleon, painting stirring tributes such as Napoleon Crossing the Alps, 1801, and The Coronation of Napoleon, 1806 (a stunning 20 x 30 feet). After Napoleon’s defeat, David went into self-imposed exile in Brussels and the Netherlands until his death in 1825. For more on David and his milieu, see my Seismic Shifts in Subject and Style: Nineteenth-Century French Painting and Philosophy.

Ca. 1793: Louis XVI Saying Farewell to His Family

Brown, a student of Gilbert Stuart and of Benjamin West (who like Brown was American-born but working in England), imagines the royal family’s grief and shock as scowling soldiers come to haul Louis XVI off to the guillotine on January 21, 1793. (Marie Antoinette was executed nine months later.) Brown is clearly more sympathetic to the royal family than to the revolutionaries.

1794: Plundering the King’s Cellar at Paris

Johan Zoffany (1733-1810), a German painter in the Neoclassical style, was active in England, Italy, and India. He was famous for his portraits, particularly of actors and actresses, and the British and Austrian royal families. His sympathies in this painting clearly lie with King Louis XVI rather than with the rabble who are guzzling the royal wine.

In Gilbert and Sullivan’s Pirates of Penzance, the Major-General boasts:

I can tell undoubted Rafaels from Gerard Dowes and Zoffanys,
I know the croaking chorus of the Frogs of Aristophanes …

Raphael was one of the most prominent painters of the High Renaissance (early sixteenth century); Gerrit Dou was a follower of Rembrandt (late seventeenth century); Zoffany was eighteenth-century.

Ca. 1797: Jean-Antoine Roucher in Prison

Jean-Antoine Roucher, the subject of this small painting, was a disciple of Voltaire and the translator of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations to French. In 1779 Roucher wrote a poem praising Louis XVI that earned him a salt-tax collectorship. Ten years later, he supported the French Revolution but denounced the tyranny of demagogues such as Robespierre. In October 1793, during the Reign of Terror, he was arrested. On July 25, 1794, Roucher was guillotined, along with his friend, the poet André Chénier. He is best known today as one of the characters in Umberto Giordano’s opera Andrea Chenier.

Hubert Robert probably painted this work as a memento for Roucher’s family. Robert himself was also arrested in October 1793, and sent to the same prison as Roucher. A prisoner with a similar name was erroneously guillotined in Robert’s place. A week after Robespierre was guillotined, Robert was released.

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