Elaine O’Brien
Study guide, Art 108 / 1

Nineteenth Century Art: A Critical History

Stephen Eisenman

Chapter 1: “Patriotism and Virtue: David to the Young Ingres,” by Thomas Crow

  1. What novel idea of the artist’s vocation developed in the eight years before the French Revolution of 1789?
  2. Who was the new audience for this new kind of artist? Where and when did they see his work? How did it begin to change and why?
  3. How does Crow define the common ground between the new artist and new audience?
  4. How were “Patriotism” and “Virtue” defined at the time?
  5. What was the duty of the new artist?
  6. What cultures became the models, the “counter-balance to the corrupt present”?
  7. How was pre-Revolutionary Classicism different from the Classicism of Louis XIV?
  8. Which artist first and most powerfully represented this new kind of Classicism?
  9. What kind of training did he have?
  10. What kind of paintings received high awards in the Royal Academy?
  11. What was the Rome Prize?
  12. How long did David study in Rome?
  13. What was the subject and moral lesson of his first painting on return to Paris?
  14. How was this painting different from earlier academic history paintings? Was it a success?
  15. What kind of education did David’s students get from him?
  16. Who was Jean-Germain Druais and how close was his relationship with David?
  17. What major work was completed by David in Rome with the assistance of Druais? What was the subject of the painting?
  18. In what ways did David ignore the rules of the Salon with this painting? What was stylistically innovative when compared with Pierre Peyron’s The Death of Alcestis, for example?
  19. How did David’s painting break with the past? What is the “rhetoric of style”?
  20. Why were women artists Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun and Adelaide Labille-Guiard able to become celebrated portraitists in the 1780s? What were their career paths?
  21. Compare the way Vigee-Lebrun and Labille-Guiard portrayed themselves.
  22. Why did David paint Socrates at the Moment of Grasping the Hemlock? What is the story and moral lesson? Who commissioned it?
  23. How did the representation of the male body changein David’s work? Why?
  24. What is the story of Plato’s Symposium? When was it written?
  25. What is the story of David’s Lictors Returning to Brutus the Bodies of His Sons? How is the moral the same and fundamentally different from David’s Horatii?
  26. What is the visual evidence that David’s Brutus is “decidedly ambivalent about the costs of the hero’s political resolve”? (p.31)
  27. How does Brutus change the elite view of tragedy and democratize it?
  28. What effect did the taking of the Bastille in 1789 have on the French art world?
  29. What painting did Anne-Louis Girodet create in Rome in 1791? What is the story? What is androgyny and how does it reflect the philosophy of David’s studio and the changing classicism of the time?
  30. What event does David’s Oath of the Tennis Court document? Was it an event from the past?
  31. Was the Oath ever finished? Why? Who was to have paid for the final picture and where was it to have hung?
  32. What attitude did the new Republican government take towards the Old Regime? What did it instruct its artists?
  33. Was the Catholic Church a source of patronage for the French artists at this time?
  34. What kind of work did artists find to do during the revolutionary years?
  35. Who was the subject of David’s Marat at his Last Breath? How does the artist shape our understanding of Marat? Is the painting of Marat incendiary? (p.36)
  36. Why was David jailed for a year in 1794?
  37. What was the situation for artists in the five years following the fall of Robespierre, the Directory 1795-99?
  38. How is Francois Gerard’s Cupid and Psyche (1798) like Anne-Louis Girodet’s Endymion, and how does it represent a depoliticization of classicism – “beyond the viscissitudes of political orthodoxy”? (p. 43)
  39. How is Girodet’s Portrait of Jean-Baptiste Belley (1797) comparable to David’s Marat?
  40. Why does Crow say that the art of English John Flaxman was “a crucial instrument in the separation of the Classical tradition from political and moral reflection on the present?” (p.44)
  41. Who was Constance Charpentier’s teacher and how did she “translate Flaxman’s graphic linearism into painting”? (p.44) How is her 1801 Melancholy an allegory? Is it a history painting in the tradition of David?
  42. How is the Platonism of David’s Soctrates transformed in Jean Broc’s Death of Hyacinth in the Arms of Apollo, 1801?
  43. What was the story illustrated by David’s The Intervention of the Sabine Women, 1799, and what was the artist’s intended meaning? Who was Hersilia and what does she personify in the painting?
  44. Where did David show The Sabine Women and how did he earn money from it?
  45. What characterized the painting done for Napoleon by David and his followers?
  46. How did the younger J.A.D. Ingres represent Napoleon in 1806? Why didn’t Napoleon like it?
  47. How long did Ingres stay at the French Academy in Rome?
  48. What has happened to the Classicism of David in Ingre’s Jupiter and Thetis, 1811?
  49. What does the “licked” finish of classicists of the early Empire, Girodet and Ingres, signify to Crow?