May 12, 2022 55A Master at Work
Colin B. Bailey
Jacques Louis David:
Radical Draftsman
an exhibition at the
Metropolitan Museum of Art,
New York City, February 17–
May 15, 2022.
Catalog of the exhibition
edited by Perrin Stein.
Metropolitan Museum of Art,
308 pp., $65.00
(distributed by Yale University Press)“Jacques Louis David: Radical Drafts-
man,” a superb survey of ninety draw-
ings at the Metropolitan Museum of
Art, invites us to “pull back the cur-
tain” on David’s paintings and follow
the artist’s creative process through
close scrutiny of his works on paper.
“In a sketch the true connoisseur is
able to discern the mind of a great mas-
ter at work,” noted the collector and
art historian Antoine Joseph Dézallier
d’Argenville in 1762. “And his imagi-
nation, kindled by the beautiful flame
that illuminates such a drawing, also
enables him to see what is not yet given
form.”
Nevertheless, by far the most spec-
tacular David discovery—and an un-
expected opportunity to witness “the
mind of a great master at work”—was
made recently at the Met, not through
the examination of his drawings but
during conservation and technical
analysis of Antoine Laurent Lavois-
ier (1743–1794) and Marie Anne La-
voisier (Marie Anne Pierrette Paulze,
1758–1836), a painting commissioned
and executed in 1788 for which not a
single preparatory drawing is known.
(It is not in the current exhibition but
remains on view in the Met’s galleries
of European painting.) Through ex-
amination by infrared reflectography
and macro X- ray fluorescence map-
ping, a team of curators, conservators,
and conservation scientists was able to
reconstitute David’s original compo-
sition, in which Marie Anne Paulze is
shown wearing a large, cumbersome
feather hat decorated with flowers
and ribbons, while her husband is por-
trayed with his legs splayed out from
underneath a gilt- bronze writing desk
and with a red mantle draped over his
shoulders. The couple was initially
placed in front of shelves teeming with
books and boxes, but without any sci-
entific instruments in sight. In the fin-
ished painting, David transformed this
flamboyant and cluttered composition
into an elegant portrayal of the wealthy
tax collector and chemist at work, as-
sisted by his devoted spouse.^1 Such dis-
tillation and paring back are consistent
with David’s manner of working gener-
ally, as we learn from the three densely
hung galleries in the Met exhibition.
The ambition and achievement of
“Jacques Louis David: Radical Drafts-
man,” which is accompanied by a first-
rate catalog, rests also in its serving as
a concise David retrospective—albeit
in black, white, brown, and gray—withdossiers devoted to almost all his major
compositions (notably the great history
paintings of the 1780s) and sections on
his political activity during the Revolu-
tion, imprisonment after Robespierre’s
downfall, rehabilitation as first painter
to Emperor Napoleon, and exile in
Brussels after the restoration of the
Bourbon monarchy. Unlike the paint-
ings of Watteau, Chardin, Boucher, or
Fragonard—all of whom have had major
surveys in American museums—it
is simply not possible to see those of
David in any concentration outside
Paris. His royal and imperial com-
missions—les grands formats—and
his greatest portraits are of such a
scale that transporting them from the
Louvre is unthinkable. When in 1989
the Réunion des musées nationaux
mounted a retrospective of David’s
work to celebrate the bicentennial of
the French Revolution, two entire floors
of the Louvre’s Mollien wing were tem-
porarily transformed into the setting
for an exhibition of some 250 works
(155 drawings among them).^2 Even to
move David’s paintings to the nearby
Grand Palais, where such surveys are
normally held, was not an option.
Drawing played a fundamental, if
utilitarian, part in David’s creative
process: it was the means by which he
developed and refined the ideas given
expression in his history paintings andhis paintings of history in the making.
As he noted in a letter of 1812, “In-
vention is the essential part of paint-
ing... and must be long meditated in
advance... [It] involves a great many
studies, drawings, and sketches.” An
inveterate draftsman since childhood,
David had been lucky in his tutor at the
Collège de Beauvais, who had encour-
aged him (as he had Hubert Robert a
generation earlier) to pursue his pas-
sion as an artist in spite of his family’s
desire for him to enter one of the lib-
eral professions. He initially struggled
as a pupil at the Académie royale de
peinture et de sculpture, finally win-
ning the Prix de Rome in 1774 on his
fourth attempt.
The five years between 1775 and 1780
that David spent as a pensionnaire of
the French Academy in Rome proved
transformative in many ways, not least
because of the opportunity to immerse
himself in classical antiquity. During
this first residency, David copied ev-
erything he saw in sketchbooks, whose
pages he reworked in pen and ink and
wash and then cut and pasted onto
larger sheets that he assembled in two
volumes, classified by subject matter.
Of the two thousand or so drawings
by David that are recorded today, over
half are sketches from these Roman al-
bums. And of those thousand or more,
two thirds were made after antique
statuary, bas- reliefs, sarcophagi, and
classical artifacts, providing a bank
of images, references, and ideas upon
which David relied in the arduous elab-
oration of his history paintings. He
would continue to refer to these albumsuntil late in his career, but they did not
accompany him in exile to Brussels.^3
In March 1826, three months after
his death, the two Roman albums were
taken apart by his heirs and rebound
in twelve smaller volumes, considered
more attractive for purchasers at Da-
vid’s posthumous sale. (Not a single one
sold at the time.) Of the ten albums that
are known today, three are included in
the first gallery of the exhibition, with
pages open to show landscapes, copies
after old master paintings, and copies
of antique sculpture. To get a sense of
how these studies migrated from album
to composition, look at the reclining fe-
male figures in Roman Album No. 11,
then walk over to the two preliminary
sheets for The Death of Camilla, a royal
commission given to David in 1781 but
never completed. The supine poses of
the murdered Camilla—killed by her
brother, Horatius, for having grieved
the death of her fiancé in public—were
inspired by these copies.Despite the centrality of drawing to
his practice and his abiding depen-
dence on the Roman albums, Philippe
Bordes writes in the current catalog
that David “chose to present himselfJacques Louis David: Deputies and Groups of Deputies: Sheet of Fourteen Studies for ‘The Oath of the Tennis Court,’ circa 1790 –1791RMN- Grand Palais, Paris /Art Resource
(^1) See David Pullins, Dorothy Mahon,
and Silvia A. Centeno, “The Lavoisiers
by David: Technical Findings on Por-
traiture at the Brink of Revolution,”
The Burlington Magazine, Vol. 163,
No. 1,422 (September 2021).
(^2) See the magisterial catalog by An-
toine Schnapper and Arlette Serullaz,
Jacques Louis David: 1748 –1825
(Paris: Editions de la Réunion des
Musées nationaux, 1989).
(^3) This vast repertory, a visual archaeo-
logical encyclopedia, was distinct from
the sketchbooks in which David, over
the course of his career, made black
chalk studies for individual projects.
Twenty- five were recorded in his in-
ventory, fourteen are known today, and
two are on view in the exhibition.
Bailey 55 57 .indd 55 4 / 14 / 22 7 : 16 PM