BARON GROS
Antoine Jean Gros (1771–1835), though a classicist by training, was forced by circumstances, and by the patronage of Napoleon who ennobled him, to devote his brush to an important phase of contemporary life—the glorification of his hero’s warlike achievements. He was by no means a realist; and although he followed Napoleon on many of his campaigns and presumably brought back with him rich material in sketches and vivid recollections, his forceful compositions accentuate the heroic aspect and the imaginative appeal of warfare, and are not spontaneous glimpses of actuality. The whole glamour of the Napoleonic legend is expressed in the group of wounded soldiers who, oblivious of their suffering, cheer their great captain in Napoleon at the Battle of Eylau (No. 389). The sense of the heroic is as pronounced in the large painting, Napoleon visiting the Plague-stricken at Jaffa (No. 388), in the Bonaparte at Arcole (No. 391), and even in the impressive Portrait of Lieutenant-General Fournier-Sarlovèze (No. 392a), silhouetted against a smoke-filled battlefield. A careful inspection of this large canvas shows pentimenti in the painting of the legs, of which the General seems now to have two pair! Gros’s weakness, like that of all David’s pupils, was his neglect of colour. His popularity waned rapidly after the fall of Napoleon. He became a victim to melancholia, and drowned himself in the Seine in 1835.
PIERRE PRUD’HON
Though not entirely detached from the ruling school of the period, Pierre Prud’hon (1758–1823) occupies a unique position among his contemporaries. Having absolved his preliminary studies at Dijon, he became the pupil of the old masters—of Correggio and Leonardo—first in Paris and then in Rome, where he worked for seven years before definitely settling at Paris in 1789. To his sympathy with the Italian masters he owed that mellowness of colour and understanding of chiaroscuro which escaped the grasp of the Davidists. He was a real painter as distinguished from the classicist draughtsmen of the official school. Even if it is impossible to share to-day the enthusiasm at one time evoked by the somewhat grotesque allegory, Justice and Divine Vengeance pursuing Crime (No. 747), this picture, which was intended for the Palais de Justice, rises immeasurably above the average of the “imaginative” paintings produced by Prud’hon’s contemporaries.
Vastly superior as regards pictorial quality and the whole conception, is the Abduction of Psyche by Zephyrus (No. 756). In the Crucifixion (No. 744), his last picture, Prud’hon rises to telling dramatic effectiveness of colour, and heralds the advent of Delacroix. But the most masterly of his seventeen paintings at the Louvre is the magnificent Portrait of a Young Man (No. 753), which the Louvre was fortunate enough to secure for £35 in 1895. It is a strangely living evocation of a personality, searching, intimate, and mysterious—a portrait not so much of the superficial features, but of the inner life of the sitter. The large Portrait of the Empress Joséphine (No. 751) suffers from comparison with this masterpiece. The pose is affected, the background dingy, and the red of the shawl introduces a harsh and disconnected note of colour.