[Illustration: FIG. 2. H. RIGAUD: GENTLEMAN PLAYING A BAGPIPE _Museum, Aix_] [Illustration: FIG. 1. L. DAVID: MADAME DE SERVAN (1799) _Private Possession, New York_] [Illustration: FIG. 3. F. BOUCHER: MADAME DE POMPADOUR _Collection of Maurice de Rothschild, Paris_] JACQUES LOUIS DAVID AND THE FRENCH REVOLUTION ❦ Is it possible that a period like the French Revolution and the era of Napoleon’s tyrannous rule should witness the development of a great art? It would seem that in the domain of art fresh creative impulses are born more often in times of unrest and disturbance than in periods of political security. Those epochs in the history of art which we regard today as “golden ages”--the age of Pericles; the Renaissance at about 1500; the Holland of the day of Frans Hals and Rembrandt--were by no means peaceful years, but periods of national strife and revolutionary ideas. No happy alliance is possible between political discipline and art which springs from the free, untrammeled impulse of the individual. We need only walk through those galleries at Fontainebleau arranged by Napoleon during the days of his Empire to recognize the deadening influence exerted by an established autocracy, and feel blow coldly over us the chilly breath of an academic and court-inspired art. On the contrary, the period of the French Revolution, and the days of Napoleon’s struggle to power, which coincided with the period of David’s finest achievement, witnessed so powerful an onrush of new ideas that their influence persists till the present day. Modern art had its inception in this period, and today, after a lapse of over a hundred years, is again tending in the direction first indicated by David. It is herein that the significance of his contribution lies. Helped by the influences of the revolution, he destroyed the artificial, hyper-refined art ideals of the eighteenth century, and substituted for them a sterner, simpler, more healthy and democratic art. That is not to affirm that his art was greater than the one it superseded. David was not a genius of the highest order as was Watteau, but to those of us sensitive to the forces underlying our own times, it says--or should say--more than pre-revolutionary art.