(5.) Dorothy Johnson, "David and Napoleonic Painting," in
Jacques-Louis David: New Perspectives, ed.
With Napoleon is the famous painter
Jacques-Louis David, who has the responsibility of "selling" Napoleon to the people as a visionary leader, a conqueror.
After the death of his father in 1784, he became a student of
Jacques-Louis David who, before the Revolution, reinvigorated French painting and established the rules of Neoclassicism.
From its appallingly glib and cliched sentence in the opening paragraph--"
Jacques-Louis David is a fantastic artist who rarely measures up to himself"--which sounds vaguely okay until you think about it for more than a minute, when it quickly becomes meaningless--there is an irritating, faux-vernacular tone to the whole review.
The leading artist was
Jacques-Louis David (1748-1825), named premier peintre of the Empire.
Napoleon had the painter
Jacques-Louis David to make visual history for him; modern conquerors like Hitler had film crews in tow; and with due regard for the bureaucratic character of modern government and corporate media imperatives, we have CNN and other news archives as our contemporary chronicles.
GREAT ARTISTS WITH TIM MARLOW:The art historian explores the life and career of French painter
Jacques-Louis David. From an early age, David was determined to become a great artist,but it was only after spending years mastering his craft in Rome that his work caught the attention of his peers,leading to commissions from King Louis XVI.
"I was always hiding behind the instructor's chair, drawing for the duration of the class," admitted
Jacques-Louis David, acknowledging his early artistic bent (1).
In Washington today, there's no such panache, no
Jacques-Louis David limning Bush in imperial drapery and resplendent crown (though surely Josephine's heart beats beneath Laura's delicious bosom).
Out went the Virgins of the Renaissance, in came Greuze, Fragonard, Boucher and
Jacques-Louis David. The collectors who unfortunately died and were sold up in the revolutionary period had a bad time of it.
The idea of writing such a book struck the author when he was looking at a picture by the French artist
Jacques-Louis David in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.