towards the dissolution of the French School. But it faced more direct assaults from within the artistic world itself. David had established himself through total rebellion against the eighteenth century. He disowned his masters and, with them, the whole inheritance of traditions accumulated since the Renaissance, preferring antique style models and casting. In 1793 the Louvre Museum opened to the public. Victories over Italy and Flanders allowed it soon to be filled with masterpieces whilst a growing fancy of collectors for Dutch paintings became quite noticeable.
At the heart of the French School, amongst its protagonists and most famous masters, a new and transformed future was in preparation, and the people of the time got a partial sense of it. They did not realise that The Death of Marat, The Coronation or the multiplication of portraits helped artists in liberating themselves, but they feared Gros’s action. A shy man, whose most sincere desire would have been to become the loyal right-hand man of David, he was driven by an internal force seemingly in spite of himself. Unwillingly, he carried the truths that were about to blossom. Napoleon at Jaffa was more than the preface to Romanticism. It asserted the joy of painting as well as a research into characterisation, movement and liveliness, to which orientalism and a picturesque quality were added. This famous painting that young people kept referring to was not an exceptional phenomenon, however. The whole of Gros’s work, his huge paintings, his portraits, sketches and watercolours, developed a whole programme: the supremacy of colour, the study of places and races, an interest in animals and particularly the big cats. National history was represented by the Visit of Charles V and François I at Saint-Denis; he thought of Othello and Ugolin in 1804 and the posthumous portrait of Lucien Bonaparte’s wife is shrouded in a modern kind of melancholy.
Hubert Robert, Design for the Grande Galerie in the Louvre, 1796.
Oil on canvas, 115 × 145 cm.
Musée du Louvre, Paris.
Ingres’s works like Jupiter and Thetis – still amazing to us nowadays – were painted at the time of David’s supremacy and are full of inspiration, sensitivity and expressive moods that were totally new. Among so many docile artists Ingres showed an untameable independence; he had broken off with David and wanted to ‘become an innovator, have his works imprinted with a character unknown’ before him. Acquaintance with the Italian primitives had polished his subtle drawing. He was one of the first to acknowledge their art as he was also the first to consider Greek vases. He would feed his genius with ideas from all sorts of areas: classical Antiquity, history, poetry, the reality of the time and oriental countries. He did not look down on colour, adored Titian and, being versatile, nervous, changing his style from one painting to the other, he would sometimes invent sharp harmonies and precious dissonances. With an implacable precision but also infinite suppleness his lines shrouded pure but non abstract shapes in which concentrated fieriness and a sensual love for beauty were visible. He who painted Fingal’s fantasy paradise, Thetis’ wavy body, and surrounded the dreamy Madame de Sénones with a floating languid atmosphere was a pre-Romantic in his own way, like Gros, and in fact more exceptional and more modern than the latter. His power was not yet recognised, though. People were sensitive to a charm that was seen as ineffable but feared the technical examples that he set. It was believed that he drew badly because he was not superstitious about the outline. On bluish paper he would use charcoal and chalk to bring out volumes and shroud synthetic and quivering shapes in space. He kept a love for graces in an heroic age but with a penetrating fieriness unknown to the eighteenth century, and he added a sense of worry to it that dragged him away from the past and made him closer to us.
Sculpture developed in a more balanced way. It was obsessed by a passion for heroic ideals more than any other form of art. Houdon continued to flourish, restating his profound genius with a bust of Napoleon.
A few signs of something about to be born were also visible in architecture. The emperor’s official architects, Percier and Fontaine, were touched by the smiles of the Italian Renaissance.
So at a time when it was believed that the arts had taken a definite direction and found fixed shapes, some forces were at work preparing for an evolution that was waiting to happen. Those forces were complex and paradoxical in many ways. Some wished for the supremacy of reality whilst others praised imagination and dreams. None of these tendencies gave way but their fate would be determined by future events. If the Empire had grown stronger and had settled in a stable order, minds would have relaxed gradually; a calm, healthy and balanced kind of art would probably have developed ensuring the triumph of realism. But on the contrary, if a storm was to burst out, a period of crisis would consequently start in which disoriented artists would listen to their sensitivity and nerves rather than rationality: that would mark the triumph of Romanticism.
It turned out to be a storm and a most terrible one. The fall of the Empire, the invasion of the country and the return of the Bourbons shook France deeply, and it was left feeling humiliated and hurt. From then on, neither religion, politics nor any position in society could offer a secure shelter. The mal du siècle became exacerbated. Helpless men turned in on themselves; they looked into their own minds in search of the laws at work behind their actions. They soared painfully on the uncertain paths of liberty, guided by their feelings and not by logic. At that time England, from which France had been cut off because of war, recreated the contacts initiated by Voltaire in the eighteenth century. France had already turned to Germany, and the influence of Germanic countries occurred precisely in the way that Madame de Staël had indicated with great lucidity: Goethe, Schiller, Shakespeare, Walter Scott, Constable, Lawrence and Beethoven came to feed the longings of an anxious generation. This is how Romantic times started.
Édouard Cibot, Anne Boleyn in the Tower, 1835.
Oil on canvas, 162 × 129 cm.
Musée Rolin, Autun.
Anne-Louis Girodet de Roucy, called Girodet-Trioson, The Entombment of Atala, 1808.
Oil on canvas, 207 × 267 cm.
Musée du Louvre, Paris.
Eugène Delacroix, Liberty Leading the People (28th July 1830), 1830.
Oil on canvas, 260 × 325 cm.
Musée du Louvre, Paris.
II. The Romantic Period
At the Exhibition of 1817, the first to take place after the Restoration, the public did not notice any signs of change. Despite David’s exile, the same masters were present defending the same ideas. Beside them there were some young people, their students and followers, supporting the cause.
No doubt it was wished that politics had not imposed or suggested topics remote from the artistic mission such as historical anecdotes or religious themes. Gérard had painted the Entry of Henri IV into Paris in the same way that he had celebrated the 10th August in the past. There were also signs of weariness; with shy audacity some artists had created scenes with a dramatic quality or tinged with light effects. In fact, there was nothing there to write home about. The young Horace Vernet displayed a large picturesque painting with his Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa but that was an isolated case; the Grand Condé by David d’Angers triggered some curiosity but without raising fears.
However, fervent, anxious and nervous young people questioned and looked for the future in studios or at the Louvre at that very time. They sensed, without understanding the exact reasons for it, that life was now to be found outside the formulae that had ensured the glory
