contemporary (rather than chronologically remote) events. West and Hogarth also explored morally
significant themes closely related to contemporary social and political developments (Hallett, 2006e,
198).
Neoclassical history paintings of the type created by David achieved stylistic innovation. His disciplined,
linear, neoclassical style brought grand political and historical themes literally into sharp, dramatic focus
in a way that was considered revolutionary at the time. Together with his politically controversial
subjects, this brought fears from officialdom that his work might incite unrest, one of d’Angiviller’s
officials stating in 1789 that he thought David’s Lictors Returning to Brutus the Bodies of his Sons
(Figure 2.12) might “furnish more food to the fermentation [of the Revolution]” due to a possible
association in the public’s mind of Brutus (who hated tyranny) with the cause of revolutionaries. David’s
earlier The Oath of the Horatii (1785) had also carried controversial connotations of the endowment of
power on a rising generation (Crow, 1985, 213).
In France these forms of modernization brought high drama to a charged political environment and have
been interpreted as constituting an implicit critique of academic conservatism, even though much late
eighteenthcentury art criticism did not characterize the Académie royale as archaic (Crow, 1985, 214–
215; Johnson,. 1993, 8–9; Wrigley, 1993, 313–314; Walsh, 1998, 182–184). History painting, the genre
conventionally regarded as the most socially exclusive and erudite, was used to convey themes popularly
associated at the time with republicanism. In this respect it shared the ambitions of much of the more
popular imagery (such as satirical prints) created by artists during the Revolutionary period (Walczak,
2007, 247–249). In spite of rebellions against the dominance of history painters in the Académie’s
administration a strong institutional and theoretical bias toward the history genre remained until the end of
the century. In such a context, artists achieved “modernity” by modifying, rather than obliterating, the
genre (Duro, 2005, 690–694).
David’s art developed further trends that had been apparent earlier in the century. The history genre, in
paintings such as The Death of du Guesclin (La Mort de Du Guesclin, 1777) by NicolasGuy Brenet
(1728–1792) absorbed increasingly, and especially from the 1770s, the rhetoric of feeling made popular
by Greuze’s genre paintings. Greuze had in turn revivified, and adapted to more private settings and
subjects, a vocabulary of feeling previously used in the grander context of history, in works such as those
of Nicolas Poussin. As is often the case, “innovation” often involved a recycling and recombination of
older possibilities. Stylistic and iconographical continuities from the seventeenth century to the eighteenth
were inevitable, given the handdown of traditions through artistic dynasties, academies and master–
pupil relationships (Conisbee, 1981, 53, 71–75). Even David’s “revolutionary” art owed a debt to
Caravaggio, Giovanni Francesco Guercino (1591–1666), Poussin and Le Brun. “Modernity” in art was at
this time cyclical or fluctuating, the “new” arising from a shared visual vocabulary that lent itself to
infinite recombinations. Innovations such as the rococo styles developed by Boucher and Watteau, which
had challenged more conservative, erudite forms of classical inspiration, often served by the end of the
century as symbols of the old regime, degenerate and morally suspect (Honour and Fleming, 1999, 615–
619). Such charges failed to acknowledge its subtly allusive playfulness, which captured such prevalent
contemporary preoccupations as the performative aspects of gender, or the “looser” moral codes
gradually replacing in France more severe, retrogressive religious codes of behavior (Barker, 2009, 307–
308). More recent scholarship has done much to reevaluate rococo art.
Generic categories evolved in ways consonant with broader ideological change. In Britain, West’s history
paintings, for example, evolved to explore Britain’s contemporary colonial interests and activities in
North America (Wrigley, 1993, 287). Marine paintings, hybrid landscape–history or landscape–genre
paintings, grew in popularity as Britain forged a new national identity through its imperialist ventures