DAVID, DELACROIX AND REVOLUTIONARY FRANCE by N.F. Karlins

One of the cheeriest faces in New York right now can be found at the Morgan Library & Museum, in an exhibition of drawings on loan from the Musée du Louvre.

It’s Pierre-Paul Prud’hon’s black-and-white chalk rendering of his pupil, fellow artist and eventual lover, Constance Mayer, dating from around 1804. She seems almost bursting with devotion and joy.Yet she appears in the exhibition, "David, Delacroix, and Revolutionary France: Drawings from the Louvre.” The show is a survey of works produced during years of political turmoil that stretched from 1774, with the ascension to the throne of King Louis XVI, through the French Revolution, Napoleon’s Consulate, Empire, abdication and exile, the restoration of the Bourbon Monarchy, the Second Republic under Louis Napoleon, and ending finally with his becoming Napoleon III in 1852.

Happily, the exhibition encompasses not just political works, but all sorts of drawings from the period, larding the selection with a generous number of sheets by Jacques-Louis David, Prud’hon, Ingres, Géricault and Delacroix. It would be very difficult to see only the works referring to political upheavals and war, even indirectly, in this show, without the leavening of other types of drawings.
Military and political might are joined in works like David’s The Emperor Napoleon I Crowning Himself, The Pope Seated Behind Him (ca. 1806), a graphite drawing for a commemorative painting that was never executed. One look at the brash gesture and brutish face of Napoleon may have inspired others to suggest a different composition. The painting with the same title in the Louvre actually shows Napoleon crowning Josephine, a much less inflammatory idea.

Injured Turk, Falling Backward (1810) by Anne-Louis Girodet de Roucy-Trioson is a study for a huge history painting depicting The Revolt at Cairo, an uprising that took place during Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign. The beautifully colored drawing in chalk and pastel is transformed in the finished painting, disappearing within a swirling press of bodies, some with bared limbs, and others exotically dressed, like this turbaned Turk.
François Marius Granet, an under-appreciated draughtsman, has created some of the most expressive landscapes of the 19th century, although he’s best known for historical works, church interiors and monuments. It’s wonderful to see three landscapes by him, all far removed from the battlefield or throne room. His View of Rome from the Piazza Trinita dei Monti at Sunset from the early 1800s, deftly executed with brown wash, is so atmospheric that you can almost feel the chill of descending night when admiring it. His Quay on the Seine with a Barge, Effect of Mist (1843) has a Whistler-like delicacy in its distant bridge in fog, while his The Stairs of a Hundred Steps at Versailles (1838) offers an intimate view of one of the least intimate spaces on the planet.
Ten sheets by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres range from a Neoclassical subject to studies for his famously erotic The Turkish Bath, but the most interesting works are his pencil portraits, with which he supported himself for some time while courting fame as a history painter. His famous studies for the portrait of the influential newspaper man Louis-François Bertin from 1832 have been seen here regularly, but the addition of Madame Bertin, also from 1832, shows how much more incisive Ingres could be.
Madame Bertin seems to have captivated him, although she appears overweight and trussed up in the curls and fashions of the day. Ingres portrays the unattractive woman in extreme detail, every flaw exposed. He depicts her as cognizant of exactly how much her intellect overshadowed her physical charms, completely at ease with the results, book in hand.



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