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  • After the Revolution: Antoine-Jean Gros, Painting and Propaganda Under Napoleon
  • Andrew Carrington Shelton
O'Brien, David . After the Revolution: Antoine-Jean Gros, Painting and Propaganda Under Napoleon. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006. Pp.288. ISBN0-2710-2305-8

The publication of David O'Brien's long-awaited and lavishly produced volume, After the Revolution: Antoine-Jean Gros, Painting and Propaganda Under Napoleon, constitutes a major advance in the scholarly understanding of early nineteenth-century French art and culture. Although promoted as the first comprehensive account of Gros's career in well over a century, O'Brien's book is less a traditional monograph than a wide-ranging exploration of official arts policies and practices during the Napoleonic era. It combines significant original research with a thorough and intelligent synthesis of previous scholarship to produce the most complete and compelling overview to date of the rise and fall of contemporary history painting as the focus of ambitious artistic activity in Post-Revolutionary France. Written in clear and forceful jargon-free prose, this book will be as accessible and entertaining to undergraduates as it is illuminating to specialists and scholars; it should, in short, be considered required reading for all students of Napoleonic France.

O'Brien's text unfolds chronologically, deriving its structure from the tumultuous political history of France between 1795 and 1815. This provides the basis for O'Brien's careful consideration of the vicissitudes of Gros's career. O'Brien deftly traces the painter's emergence as yet another talented pupil of Jacques-Louis David in the mid 1790s and early adventures as a kind of artistic journeyman in Italy, his rise to preeminence [End Page 153] as artistic propagandist-in-chief to Napoleon, and his tragic demise under the Bourbon and Orleanist regimes. (Although O'Brien focuses his attention squarely on the Imperial period, the last chapter of his book, devoted to the almost wholly unexplored final two decades of Gros's career, provides one of the most original and illuminating accounts yet of late neoclassicism.) All of Gros's major canvases are discussed in detail, from the career-making Bonaparte at the Bridge of Arcole of 1796 to the literally life-ending Hercules and Diomedes of 1835 – it was largely in response to the negative criticism generated by this work that Gros committed suicide by throwing himself into a tributary of the Seine. Although O'Brien writes insightfully and compellingly of all these pictures, he is ultimately less concerned with Gros's paintings as works of art in and of themselves than as documents revealing the underlying logic of the various arts administrations that oversaw their production and display. Most particularly, O'Brien is interested in the rise of public opinion as the supreme arbiter of all things artistic during the course of the Revolution and the challenges this situation presented to a Napoleonic regime intent on appropriating monumental artistic production for purely propagandistic ends. The key development here is the emergence of what O'Brien refers to as the "Republic of the Arts," adopting the phrase coined by reform-minded critics and theorists of the late eighteenth century to describe an ideal (and, it must be said, wholly mythic) situation in which artists operate as free creative agents beholden only to the judgment of an enlightened and disinterested public – this as opposed to pandering to the dictates of despotic and self-interested patrons. According to O'Brien, Napoleon's authoritarianism proved insufficient to overcome this belief in the fundamental autonomy of art, creating a dilemma for those artists who sought – voluntarily or otherwise – to enlist their brushes too blatantly in the service of the imperial regime.

It is this emerging belief in the fundamental incommensurability of art and partisan politics – a belief that O'Brien himself curiously seems to share – to which much of the alleged blandness and mediocrity of official painting under Napoleon is attributed. Gros is saved from this fate by the persistence of what O'Brien describes as his personal pictorial flare – all that Rubensian color and lush painterliness – as well as his penchant for graphic violence and the macabre – the stomach-churning piles of dead and...

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