E6 EZ EE THE WASHINGTON POST.SUNDAY, MARCH 27 , 2022
Art
MUSÉE DE LOUVRE, PARIS, ON DEPOSIT AT THE MUSÉE NATIONAL DES CHÂTEAUX DE VERSAILLES ET DE TRIANON/RMN-GRAND PALAIS/ART RESOURCE, N.Y./PHOTO BY GÉRARD BLOT
Artist Jacques Louis David’s “The Oath of the Tennis Court” was never finished. The drawing depicts a key moment from the French Revolution, but the scene never quite coheres into a meaningful narrative.
with operatic intensity.
But “The Oath of the Tennis
Court” was never finished. The
Revolution, in which David (1748-
1825) played a central role, with
bloody hands, moved too quickly.
Three years later, the artist, who
was intimate with Jean-Paul
Marat and Maximilien Robespi-
erre, was in jail along with other
leaders of the Reign of Terror. He
managed to avoid execution and,
by 1804, was named first painter
to the new emperor, Napoleon.
And months after his imperial
patron was packed off to St.
Helena in 1815, he, too, became
an exile, spending the last years
of his life in Brussels.
A sense of speed is palpable
throughout the exhibition. In his
lectures on European history,
published as “In Bluebeard’s Cas-
tle,” the critic George Steiner
focused on speed during the
years David was active. “The
French Revolution and the Napo-
leon Wars,” wrote Steiner, “liter-
ally quickened the pace of felt
time.” It was an era of “great
storms of being.”
David, who voted to send Lou-
is XVI to the guillotine, both
painted and perpetrated those
great storms. Early drawings,
including pages from albums he
made while studying in Rome,
suggest a rapacious visual appe-
tite. He made confident studies
of the human form, cityscapes of
the monumental architecture
and statuary of the eternal city,
and small studies of classic paint-
ings. He fixed these sketches into
volumes organized not by date,
but by themes and visual affini-
ties. These leave a confused sense
of David’s development during
these early years, after he won
the prestigious Prix de Rome in
1774, but also a clear impression
of his ambition and talent. He
would take Rome home with him
when he returned to Paris in 1780
and use its visual material as
inspiration throughout his life.
Among the drawings made in
Rome, the cityscapes seem most
intimately connected with David’s
later paintings. They are precise
and curiously inanimate, like
drawings for stage design. They
don’t depict the organic existence
of buildings in relation to each
other, but suggest places where
people might enter and exit,
routes for procession, dramatic
venues for a speech or lament. In
his greatest paintings, we view
these events as if from a seat in the
stalls, perfectly framed and staged,
all the players arrayed so as to be
neatly seen from a single perspec-
tive. History isn’t just spectacle —
it is always legible, comprehensi-
ble and delights the eye.
The tendency in David’s edit-
ing process is almost always to
the hortatory. Sketches for the
BY PHILIP KENNICOTT
I
n 1791, the French painter
Jacques Louis David made a
large, meticulously detailed
drawing for a painting he
never produced, called “The
Oath of the Tennis Court.” It
depicts a key moment from the
French Revolution, in 1789, when
representatives of the French
people gathered to oppose the
king and commit themselves to a
new form of governance.
The drawing is full of bustle
and incident. Curtains billow
violently above the men below,
waving hats and arms, focusing
their energy on a standing figure
who holds his right hand up in a
solemn gesture of avowal. But
something isn’t quite right about
the whole scene. It teems with
excitement, but never quite co-
heres into a meaningful narra-
tive. It is both busy and static,
and the impression is more stagy
than dramatic.
There is evidence throughout
the Metropolitan Museum of Art
exhibition “Jacques Louis David:
Radical Draftsman” that the art-
ist might have improved the
image had he been able to paint
it. Many of the some 80 draw-
ings, sketches and other works in
the show document David’s cre-
ative process as he developed key
paintings, heightening the dra-
ma, winnowing out unnecessary
actors, focusing interactions
1787 “The Death of Socrates,” in
the Met’s collection, place the
bowl of poisonous hemlock in
the center of the drama. In one
drawing, Socrates seems to dis-
miss the bowl; in another he
rests his hand lightly on it. In the
finished painting, his right hand
is just above it, while he makes a
rhetorical gesture with his left
arm. He seems, in the final
version, to be multitasking, non-
chalantly grasping his own de-
mise while making a few final
remarks to a rapt audience.
While he was imprisoned, Da-
vid made some of the most
compelling drawings on view, of
fellow prisoners. They are seen
from the side, as if on coins or
medallions, but they are surpris-
ingly informal. The men, radicals
responsible for the execution of
so many citizens of France, look a
little beleaguered and shabby.
After he and many of his fellow
Jacobins were released from pris-
on, David claimed to have been
only an artist, albeit one over-
whelmed by the politics of the
day. That was disingenuous, and
sounds a bit like a comedian or
actor today, wriggling out of
responsibility for some cruel re-
mark, claiming only to be an
entertainer. He was, in fact, a
master propagandist of the Revo-
lution, celebrating its martyrs
and mythologizing its leaders.
The prison portraits are a
breath of fresh air from the more
theatrical David. Another leaven-
ing moment comes in his final
years, in Brussels, when his
drawings become more explor-
atory and intimate, as if the
theatrical figures he painted ear-
lier are heard conversing not in
formal alexandrines, but ordi-
nary dialogue. An 1825 drawing
of his son Eugene and daughter-
in-law Anne-Therese is among
the most moving in the exhibi-
tion. Eugene, seen in the drawing
looking up as if to his father’s
heavenly ascent, inscribed it, the
“last drawing by my poor father.”
David was old, and sick, at the
time. Throughout his career, and
in that flawed drawing of the
Tennis Court Oath, he painted
scenes of imagined social unity
and reconciliation. When he died
later in 1825, France had more
than a century of social and
political chaos still ahead, with
Bourbons, Bonapartes and other
rogues ready in the wings for yet
more bloodletting. David made
his portion of that thrilling to
behold, and his art charged the
atmosphere for decades of yet
more storminess.
Jacques Louis David: Radical
Draftsman Through May 15 at the
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New
York. metmuseum.org.
CRITIC’S NOTEBOOK
J acques Louis David helped sell Frenchmen on R evolution
FONDATION NAPOLÉON/PATRICE MAURIN BERTHIER
D avid’s “Napoleon Crowning Himself.” In 1804, the artist was named first painter to the new emperor, Napoleon.
THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART, NEW YORK
D avid’s “The Death of Socrates.” In the finished painting,
Socrates’s right hand is just above the bowl of poisonous hemlock.
MAY 6 & 7
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