Emulation: Making Artists for Revolutionary France
Hardcover
1995 · New Haven, CT
by Crow, Thomas
New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995. Hardcover. VG/VG. Grey glossy wraps. 365 pp. 206 color and bw plates. This book puts the life of the artist at the centre of innovative art history, narrating a biography of five painters at the centre of events in Revolutionary France: Jacques Louis-David and his extraordinarily precocious pupils Drouais, Girodet, Gerard, and Gros. Their shared ambition was to build an alternative, exalted life in art, one committed to rigorous classical erudition while suffused with the emotional depth of familial bonds. In this experiment of enlightened teaching, the roles of master and pupil were frequently reversed. Thomas Crow tells how the personal histories and aesthetic choices of these artists were played out within the larger arena in which a whole social order was being overturned, a king embodying all patriarchal authority was put to death, and a republic of equal male brotherhood was proclaimed. The revolutionary ideal of male fraternity was just one of many shifts in the philosophical underpinnings of the visual arts, the sum of which moved painting more and more into an exclusively masculine frame of reference. (Inventory #: 19946.1)