# Transcript

Emma Barker
In December 1799, Jacques Louis David, the most famous French painter of the day, put his recently finished painting, The Intervention of the Sabine Women, on show in the Louvre.
It was an ambitious history painting depicting a scene from classical antiquity.
David's painting offers a moral lesson to the spectator, and shows the aftermath of the famous episode from ancient Roman history, of the abduction of the Sabine women. The story goes that the women, who were by now married to their abductors and had children by them, intervened to stop a battle between their Roman husbands and their Sabine relations.
The plea for peace that the Sabine's embodied was of direct relevance to the contemporary political situation in 1799. The painting can be read as a call for reconciliation to end the conflict of the revolutionary years.
What particularly interests me however, is that this plea for peace is made by women, and, more particularly, by women in their role as wives and mothers. Notice the children in the foreground, and the kneeling woman whose bare breasts served to emphasise her nurturing role.
The characterisation of the female figures in the Sabine's accords with the ideas of one of the most influential thinkers of the eighteenth century, Jean Jacques Rousseau, who insisted that motherhood was woman's destiny, and paid particular emphasis on the importance of maternal breastfeeding.
This meant, Rousseau argued, that women should keep to the private sphere, to the home and the family, and leave the public realm - the world of government and politics - to men. These structures had been defied by some actual women who, during the Revolution, sought to engage in political activity. Even though the women here are intervening in public affairs, they’re not defying Rousseau’s idea of proper feminity because they are doing so purely in defence of the sanctity of family ties.
The appeal of David’s painting was not entirely moral however. One person observed that the central female figure was dress in white “a la grec”, that is according to the present fashion. In fact, her white shift dress is very similar to the simple tunic dress worn by the society ladies whom David painted, such as Madamme de Verninac.
Aileen Ribiera,
There was very much a taste in the late 1790's with the neoclassical, we see it in theatre, we see it in period design, most of all we see it in clothing. It's not something that appears out of the blue in the 1790's, it does first appear in the 1780's when women at the French Court, and particularly Marie Antoinette, popularised the wearing of loose shifts made out of linen or muslin, tied high under the waist with a sash, but this style of dress which equates
to new ideas of hygiene and simplicity in dress really comes into its own with the French Revolution because the whole ethos of the French Revolution the ideas behind it, are really largely related to the admired ideals of classical Greece and Rome, and so this style of dress which paradoxically starts out as a Royal informal dress becomes the dress of the French Revolutionary period.
The kind of icon figure of the late 1790’s – turn of the century – was Madame Recamier by David and there she sits on her chez long, looking very neo-classical, in beautiful white Indian muslin. But if we look at her closely what appears again to be a simple draped tube of white fabric, is actually a much more constructed dress. We can see that the bodice has got seams at the back, it’s a very taught, very tight, manages to hold the bust in place, so its really not a loose tube of fabric as we see in de Henriette Verninac’s portrait.
Emma Barker
The simple dress worn by Madame de Recamier in David’s portrait, is matched by the austerity of the whole composition. She does not look here much like a fashionable beauty, renowned for her ability to conquer men’s hearts. Her stiff pose reveals little of her charms and her gaze is blank and solemn. It’s important, however, to note that some of the austerity of David's painting comes from the fact that the painting is unfinished.
It has often been claimed that the reason for his failure to finish it was that Madame Recamier disliked the image and quarrelled with the artist. The evidence for this is not clear cut.
It does look very different from another portrait of Madame Recamier, by David's former pupil Gerard, which presumably was to her satisfaction.
In Gerard's portrait her body forms a sinuous curve, her eyes are coquettishly lowered, her lips gently smiling. Painting portraits of fashionable women, such as Madamme Recamier, paid well, but was much less highly regarded at the time than history painting.
Dr. Tony Halliday,
The Salon, the public exhibition of art held every two years during the Revolution every year in the Louvre, most portrait painters had been excluded from that, and in the eighteenth century it was dominated by big history paintings paid for the by the government or by the Church. Under the Revolution these official commissions faded away, and the Salon was dominated by the market, that is chiefly by commissioned portraits, so the Revolution changed the public face of art. When people went to this exhibition which showed them the state of art in France in the 1790's after the Revolution, what they saw was not by and large grand history paintings with a message for everybody, but portraits of private individuals which, most of which under the old regime would not have been exhibited.
Emma Barker
Among the many portraits exhibited in the Salon of 1800, was one of a black woman by Madame Benoist, a former pupil of David.
Prof. Helen Weston
It was a very dramatic work, it's a very brave painting really, it's a very strong forceful image, and even an engraving like this of the hang of the 1800 Salon, you can discern it amongst these small paintings, and even amongst these large history paintings, you can actually pick it out. And it's this contrast really between the dark figure silhouetted against this very light background, and it gives it a strong three dimensionality a strong sense of her presence, the presence of the sitter.
We don't know a lot about the sitter, but we think she was a domestic servant in the household of the artist's brother in law. Most artists consult the sitter about how they want to be presented, but she would have had no say about whether a breast should be revealed or not or, whether she should be smiling or have a stern expression and so on. What we do know is that she was perceived by the critics at the time of the 1800 Salon as extraordinarily ugly, and a very general point is made about black people as being ugly. And a number of critics say how much they would have preferred to see the artist herself. She was known as this very very beautiful woman, and adored and admired by many suitors. This is a portrait of her supposedly by Gerard, which shows her just about at this time 1799/1800, and she does indeed look very attractive very plump, curly hair, a really rather unpleasant contrast, between her, her beauty, her status in society, and that of the sitter.
Presenter
Many portraits shown in the Salon were of obscured sitters, but usually these were wealthy, private individuals, for example this portrait by Ingres, another former pupil of David, shows Madamme Riviere, wife of a bureaucrat in the Imperial Administration.
Emma Barker
The overall effect is more than a little claustrophobic. Madame Riviere seems very much a hothouse flower, lounging as she does on velvet cushions in the airless space.
Aileen Ribiera
Ingres was an artist who more than any other at this time really relies on luxury goods and the painting of luxury goods to get an amazing emphasis on his portraits. Ingres's portrait of Madame Riviere was for long known as La Femme auchelle because it is the shawl which is the dominant element in this painting. We can see the way in which Angra has sort of highlighted the light on this wonderful sort of sinuous subtle cashmere as it sort of entwines its way round her body.
These shawls like the fine Indian muslin were something which were produced in the British Empire in the late eighteenth century, so that as with the fine Indian muslin Napoleon certainly tried to prevent the ladies of his Court actually wearing these shawls and the fine muslins and wanted them to wear French products, shawls of French manufacture. And indeed they tried to do this but it wasn't at all popular.
Emma Barker
For Napleon’s staging of his Coronation, a court dress had to be devised which would be grand but distinct from that of the Ansian Regime.
Aileen Ribiera
He asked Josephine's opinion about this, and he thought that she looked wonderful in the high waisted, white fashionable dress so, he said that is going to be Court dress, but it will not be made of the fine muslins, or linens it will be made with silk, because of course his agenda to a large extent was also to try and revise French luxury industry of the silk trade and so on. So that French Court dress is high waisted with the little sort of puff sleeves, but it's made of absolutely sumptuous fabric, heavy satin with an attached train, it's got embroidery, it's characterised by lots of gold braid on the sleeves and by the very high, spiky Medici collar which we see of course to such advantage as Josephine is bending her head in David's great coronation paintings.
Presenter.
Josephine's train in David's painting, is held by two of her Court ladies.
In reality it was carried by five Imperial Princesses, but Napoleon's sisters complained about having to perform this menial task, and persuaded David to depict them apart from the Empress.
They are, from left to right, Napoleon's sisters Caroline, Pauline, and Alicia, his stepdaughter Hortence Deboane, and sister in law Julie.
The painting is in fact not just a record of imperial ceremonial, but also a kind of huge family portrait. It testifies to Napoleon's ambitions to found a new imperial dynasty, and ambition that would lead him to divorce Josephine in 1810, and take a new bride, the Austrian Princess Marie-Louise, in order to have a son to succeed him.
It is significant that, in David's painting, Josephine is made to look conspicuously younger than her forty one years. This could have been intended to suggest that she was still capable of child-bearing. It is also significant that she appears kneeling before her husband, her head submissively bowed. In fact, the whole representation of Josephine here can be seen as not only reflecting Napoleon's hopes for an heir, but also his more general views of women. He considered that their principal, even sole purpose in life, was to marry and have children, and insisted on their subordination to male authority.