LOW ART, POPULAR IMAGERY AND CIVIC COMMITMENT IN THE FRENCH REVOLUTION
←
→
Page content transcription
If your browser does not render page correctly, please read the page content below
LOW ART, POPULAR IMAGERY AND CIVIC
COMMITMENT IN THE FRENCH REVOLUTION
G E R R I T WA L C Z A K
In 1789 French artists became citizens among equals, free agents within the social
scheme of the indivisible sovereign nation. Citizenship implied political rights as
well as civic obligations, and hundreds of artistes-citoyens were to serve as electors,
local administrators, government officials and volunteer soldiers in conse-
quence.1 Some, like the most famous painter–politician of the French Revolution,
Jacques-Louis David, had belonged to the artistic establishment of the Ancien
Regime, but the vast majority of committed artist–citizens had been excluded
from the sphere of official art, namely from the privileged Royal Academy. After
much petitioning, the National Assembly in 1791 succumbed to the combined
pressure of dissident academicians and independent artists. The Salon was
wrestled away from the Royal Academy, resulting in a spectacular rise in the
number of painters exhibiting.2 Quite a few of these new exhibitors were artists
of considerable merit, but the intrusion of even the least talented of painters into
a public space once reserved for the appraisal of ‘high’ art reached its peak in the
political confusion of 1793, when the Salon was overloaded with new names.3
Their participation was the token of the new freedom that artists now enjoyed,
and these artistic beneficiaries of egalitarianism were the true sans-culottes of the
Salon.
Through a case study devoted to one of the new names of the Salon of 1793,
I explore here some of the complex relations between ‘low’ art and revolutionary
politics.4 A painter of minor talent and duly forgotten, Jean-Jacques Hauer (1751–
1829) was an artist–citizen serving with the local militia, and a humble practi-
tioner enjoying his greatest success at the height of collective militancy known as
the sans-culotte movement.5 The French Revolution allowed him to go public, and
most of his œuvre is closely tied to its tangled politics, his subject matter ranging
from General Lafayette to Louis XVII. A closer look at the creation of the greatest
masterpiece of French Revolutionary art will inevitably draw attention to this
artist too, for Hauer was faster than David in responding to the assassination of
Jean-Paul Marat in July 1793.
The lack of a genuine ‘art révolutionnaire’ was deplored by contemporary critics
throughout the 1790s.6 Their aesthetic standards were inherited from the Ancien
Regime, inducing these writers to turn away from works which, if only because
they were badly painted, failed to meet conventions of taste. According to critics,
ART HISTORY . ISSN 0141-6790 . VOL 30 NO 2 . APRIL 2007 pp 247–277
& Association of Art Historians 2007. Published by Blackwell Publishing, 247
9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.L O W A R T, P O P U L A R I M A G E R Y A N D C I V I C C O M M I T M E N T I N T H E F R E N C H R E V O L U T I O N 5.1 Jean-Jacques Hauer, The Assassination of Marat, 1794. Oil on canvas, 60 49 cm. Versailles: Musée Lambinet. 248 & ASSOCIATION OF ART HISTORIANS 2007
L O W A R T, P O P U L A R I M A G E R Y A N D C I V I C C O M M I T M E N T I N T H E F R E N C H R E V O L U T I O N
the Salon of 1793 was a ‘fatras de production ineptes’ (‘a jumble of feckless
productions’) largely composed of ‘barbouillages soi-disant patriotiques’ (‘daubs
claimed to be patriotic’), though conservative denigrations along this line could
only be published after the bloody roll-back under the Thermidorian Conven-
tion.7 If, artistically, the Salon of 1793 was a disappointment, this was precisely
because it had been meant to be a sans-culotte exhibition, which was organized as a
democratic art show for the new egalitarian public. Only two days before the
Salon opened its doors on 10 August, the spokesman of the Committee of Public
Instruction, Henri Grégoire, in a report read before the National Convention,
neatly summed up the ideology behind this democratization of the Salon:
‘Genius, and we say this bluntly, almost always the true genius is sans-culotte.’8 As
far as artistic genius is concerned, Grégoire was proved wrong by the outcome,
but he did indeed get a sans-culotte exhibition, even though many of the new-
comers showed little interest in treating subject matter related to the history and
achievements of the Revolution.9
Albert Soboul’s marxist interpretation of the sans-culotterie from the Parisian
sections as a ‘popular mass-movement’ has prompted sustained debate ever since
its publication nearly half a century ago.10 Historians challenging Soboul’s view
have scrutinized members of these local administrations for their bourgeois
background, describing them as property owners, shopkeepers, master-artisans
and clerks, men who had already taken part in the ‘liberal’ revolution of 1789 on a
local level.11 One particular group of middle-class professionals among the sans-
culottes in the Parisian sections supporting this interpretation are the painters,
sculptors and engravers themselves. Next to a much larger number of those
working in the field of applied or decorative arts, Soboul’s own repertory of
sectionary personnel contains the names of some eighty men, who were, in the
strictest sense of the term, artists, Jean-Jacques Hauer among them.12 Yet the
impact of this transformation of the bourgeois into a citizen, and of the citizen
into a sans-culotte, on the production of art, let alone on its appraisal, is difficult to
gauge. The republican discourse of equality eventually gave the ideal citizen a
distinctly plebeian touch, however well-to-do and educated he may have been.13
Sans-culotte rhetoric, straightforward and blunt, suggests that formal aspects in
general were of little concern to true patriots. As a petition of sectionaries to the
National Convention insisted, ‘les vrais Républicains, les sans-culottes, ne savent point
faire des phrases’ (‘the true republicans, the sans-culottes, do not know how to
make phrases’), but if these brave citizens were asking for nothing less than
representations of martyrs of the Revolution ‘tels qu’ils ont été peints par le citoyen
David’ (‘such as those painted by the citizen David’), there is abundant evidence
that painted plaster casts of the busts of Louis-Michel Le Peletier de Saint-Fargeau
and Marat, cheap specimens of ‘low’ art, satisfied their demands equally well.14
Much to the benefit of Hauer and others like him, many of those who proved most
agitated by revolutionary politics refused to pay much attention to conventional
standards of artistic excellence.
CITIZENS IN ARMS
Born in the small town of Algesheim near Mainz in 1751, Johann Jakob Hauer
received his initial training with Johann Philipp Hoffmeister at Mannheim before
leaving Germany, but his entire career in France before the Revolution remains a
& ASSOCIATION OF ART HISTORIANS 2007 249L O W A R T, P O P U L A R I M A G E R Y A N D C I V I C C O M M I T M E N T I N T H E F R E N C H R E V O L U T I O N
matter of conjecture. While he is said to have spent some time at the municipal
drawing school at Arras, the sole proof of his activity as an artist seems to be a
history painting copied from a print after Jean-Baptiste Nattier’s Joseph fleeing
Potiphar’s Wife.15 If Hauer stayed in Arras before his arrival in Paris in 1774, he
might have got in touch with Dominique Doncre, a provincial painter of genre
scenes and small portraits, who had settled in Arras in 1772. Although Georges
Duval, a young man just out of college in 1789, became acquainted with Hauer
only after the Restoration, his Souvenirs de la Terreur are the main source on what
became of the artist from the beginning of the Revolution.16 According to Duval,
Hauer was living at the corner of the rue Saint-André-des-Arcs and the rue
Contrescarpe in the densely populated heart of the old quarters on the ‘rive
gauche’ of Paris. Like most of his neighbours, the painter paid a moderate capi-
tation tax only, but those 15 livres imposed on him were sufficient for the quali-
fication as a citoyen actif under the census introduced when the deputies to the
Estates-General were to be elected in April 1789.17 After the city’s local adminis-
tration was reorganized a year later, parts of the districts of the Cordeliers and
Saint-André-des-Arcs formed the Section du Théâtre-Français. This was later
named the Section de Marseilles before being changed into the Section de Marat
in the summer of 1793. Thus the artist lived in one of the most radical quarters of
Paris, for this was the section from which Jean-Paul Marat, Camille Desmoulins,
Philippe-François Fabre d’Églantine and a number of other revolutionaries moved
into national politics. Georges-Jacques Danton was already presiding over the
Cordeliers’ general assembly at the beginning of the Revolution, and his
successor, the engraver Antoine-François Sergent, was one of three Jacobin artists
eventually elected into the National Convention.
Shortly after the upheaval of July 1789 Hauer appears to have volunteered for
the militia organized in the Cordeliers district as the local branch of the ‘Garde
Nationale Parisienne’, the first mass organization to come into being in the French
Revolution. Hauer was not the only painter in his quarter to join this battalion of
the National Guard: Pierre-Alexandre Wille, an agréé of the Royal Academy, enlisted
in the first days of the insurrection, became battalion commander in June 1791,
and served as one of the six division commanders of Paris from April to August
1792.18 In 1793 Hauer was elected capitain aide-majeur (the battalion commander’s
adjutant), serving at least a three-month term before the beginning of the repub-
lican calendar in September.19 The painter must have held the rank of a captain of
one of the battalions’ companies when elected to his new charge, and he is likely to
have resumed this position after completing his term at battalion level.
Members of the military and their families were the subject of a group
portrait which may be the first surviving painting that Hauer executed during the
Revolution. It has hitherto been regarded as the work of an anonymous French
artist of the early nineteenth century (plate 5.2).20 Watched by a pet dog in the
foreground, ten people from infancy to old age are posing awkwardly in an
interior. The most striking feature is the showy uniform of three of those
portrayed, which won the painting its earlier title as a ‘Military Family Portrait’.
The dark blue coats with white lapels, red collars, trim and cuffs are easily
identified as the uniform adopted by the Parisian National Guard. The colour
of the cuffs was changed from red to white after the first anniversary of the
Revolution, when a national standard, based on the Paris model, was introduced,
250 & ASSOCIATION OF ART HISTORIANS 2007L O W A R T, P O P U L A R I M A G E R Y A N D C I V I C C O M M I T M E N T I N T H E F R E N C H R E V O L U T I O N
5.2 Jean-Jacques Hauer (attrib.), Family Portrait with National Guard Officers,
c. 1789–90. Oil on canvas, 61.3 50.2 cm. New York: The Metropolitan
Museum of Art, Robert Lehman Collection.
along with the interior, costumes and hairstyles, which permit a fairly precise
dating of this group portrait between August 1789 and July 1790. This uniform
became a ‘habit national’, symbolizing the rights as well as the duties of citizen-
ship through service in the revolutionary militia, which was essentially middle
class and excluded only those too poor to register until its ranks were eventually
opened to these citoyens passifs in July 1792.21 Two of the guardsmen are wearing
white waistcoats and breeches, the standard uniform of the National Guard
infantry, while the one to the right additionally displays the epaulettes and red
sash of a captain. Wearing the same coat, but with a blue waistcoat and breeches,
the third citizen-soldier belongs to the ‘Chasseurs’, a mounted unit of the
National Guard formed in October 1789 to provide security at the city’s barriers,
river ports and markets.
None of these National Guardsmen have been identified, nor is it clear
whether some special event is commemorated. The portrait certainly bears
& ASSOCIATION OF ART HISTORIANS 2007 251L O W A R T, P O P U L A R I M A G E R Y A N D C I V I C C O M M I T M E N T I N T H E F R E N C H R E V O L U T I O N
5.3 Jean-Marie Hooghstoel, M. Estellé, lace merchant in the rue Saint-Honoré,
wearing the uniform of a captain of the ‘Chasseurs’ of the National Guard, 1790.
Oil on canvas, 45.5 37.5 cm. Paris: Musée Carnavalet.
witness, however, to the pride taken by citizens in the volunteer militia, ‘la
soldatesque bourgeoisie de notre ville de Paris’ (‘the bourgeois soldiery of our city of
Paris’).22 The first portraits of National Guardsmen seem to have been painted
soon after the militia’s creation, and at least one, the Citoyen Nau-Deville, en
uniforme de la garde nationale by Jean-François Bellier, was exhibited at the Salon of
1791 (Paris: Musée Carnavalet).23 The uniforms of the three part-time soldiers in
Hauer’s portrait denote a fairly common shift in portraiture from private identity
to public commitment. This transition was largely due to non-academic outsiders,
that is, to painters whose prices did not put too much of a strain on the purses of
middle-class bourgeois. Like Hauer, though more accomplished, such artists were
genre painters and portraitists primarily working in small formats, among them
Louis-Léopold Boilly and Dominique Doncre.24 One example showing a National
Guard officer is the small full-length portrait of a M. Estellé, a lace merchant in
the rue Saint-Honoré, wearing the uniform of a captain of the ‘Chasseurs’ of the
National Guard, by Jean-Marie Hooghstoel (plate 5.3). Hooghstoel was another
252 & ASSOCIATION OF ART HISTORIANS 2007L O W A R T, P O P U L A R I M A G E R Y A N D C I V I C C O M M I T M E N T I N T H E F R E N C H R E V O L U T I O N
minor artist who, although academically trained, made his public debut at the
Salon of 1793.
The attribution of the New York group portrait to Hauer (plate 5.1) is primarily
based on comparison with a work by Hauer of 1791 (plate 5.4), where the central
figures are General Gilbert du Motier Lafayette, the commandant-général of the
Parisian National Guard, and his wife Adrienne de Noailles. Both paintings are
strongly coloured, with the same clear outlines, and the same weaknesses in
perspective and anatomical proportion. This revolutionary conversation piece
shows the Lafayettes in a drawing
room fantastically decorated with
busts of Honoré-Gabriel Riquetti,
Comte de Mirabeau, André Désilles,
Benjamin Franklin and Jean-Jacques
Rousseau.25 On the harpsichord sits a
copy of the Ça Ira, while on the chair
lies the Gazette Nationale, ou Le Moniteur
Universel of 5 March 1791. Meanwhile,
Adrienne de Noailles is depicted
drawing a triumphal arch under her
husband’s direction for the Fête de
la Fédération of 14 July 1791.26 The
front page of the Moniteur contains a
letter from a National Guard soldier
glorifying the role of the armed citi-
zenry on the evening of 28 February
1791, where it had fought ‘sept à huit
cent assassins, ci-devant nobles’ (‘seven
to eight hundred assassins, former
noblemen’) ready to penetrate into the 5.4 Jean-Jacques Hauer, General Lafayette and his
Tuileries and abduct the king.27 The Wife, 1791. Oil on canvas, 93.3 74.6 cm. Ann
spectre of these ‘chevaliers du poignard’ Arbor: The University of Michigan Art Museum.
(‘knights of the daggers’) would be re-
invoked by the Jacobins after the assassinations of Louis-Michel Le Peletier de
Saint-Fargeau and Marat two years later, but in 1791 this incident helped to save
the National Guard’s reputation. On the afternoon of 28 February its units had
clashed with the populace in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine instead of heroically
fighting off counter-revolutionary plotters. Estrangement between the people
and their militia ultimately culminated in the massacre on the Champ de Mars
on 17 July, when guardsmen fired into the crowds only three days after the
second Festival of the Federation.28 Although the bust of Mirabeau suggests a
date later than April 1791, Hauer’s conversation piece clearly draws on Lafayette’s
popularity, as exploited by Philibert-Louis Debucourt in a mezzotint published
the year before (plate 5.5).29 The engraver Debucourt was an agréé of the Royal
Academy, who had cleverly dedicated his portrait of Lafayette, ‘aux Citoyens
Soldats’, which may well have helped to promote its sale among proud citizen-
soldiers.
Volunteer service by painters, sculptors and engravers in the armed citizenry
is a form of commitment frequently overlooked by art historians. Hauer and
& ASSOCIATION OF ART HISTORIANS 2007 253L O W A R T, P O P U L A R I M A G E R Y A N D C I V I C C O M M I T M E N T I N T H E F R E N C H R E V O L U T I O N
5.5 Philibert-Louis Debucourt,
General Lafayette, 1790. Mezzotint,
48.5 40.5 cm. Berlin:
Staatliche Museen zu Berlin,
Kupferstichkabinett.
fellow artist Pierre-Alexandre Wille (1748–1821) were far from exceptional, for
quite a number of artists in other Parisian sections reached similar positions of
first and second battalion commander, including Louis-Gabriel Moreau, Matthias
Halm, Jean Duplessi-Bertaux and Piat-Joseph Sauvage. By serving in the militia
they attained a new social status defined by patriotic commitment at the cost of
professional identity. Uniforms had to be purchased at the artists’ own expense,
while guard duties kept painters out of their studios. Like any other form of civic
commitment, a painter’s career as an unpaid National Guard volunteer speaks
more about his political sympathies in the French Revolution than his art, which
might rather reflect the ideological preferences of his clientele, the public he was
courting, or the state, whose commissions could compensate for the loss of court
patronage and the emigration of affluent collectors. Thus it seems rather
surprising that there are no self-portraits of Paris-based artists in National Guard
uniforms; the sole example by a provincial artist is a gouache executed around
1790 by Jean Hans, a painter settled in Strasbourg.30
T H E A S S A S S I N AT I O N O F M A R AT
Stabbed with a kitchen knife, Jean-Paul Marat died a martyr in his famous bath on
the evening of 13 July 1793.31 Marie-Anne-Charlotte Corday, a Girondin sympa-
thizer from Caen, was arrested before she could leave Marat’s apartment in the
rue Cordeliers, just a few streets from Hauer’s address. Soon the sectionary militia
rushed to the scene, taking up posts inside the house, where the first interroga-
tion took place, and trying to cope with the crowds gathering in the area. Corday
254 & ASSOCIATION OF ART HISTORIANS 2007L O W A R T, P O P U L A R I M A G E R Y A N D C I V I C C O M M I T M E N T I N T H E F R E N C H R E V O L U T I O N
was transported to the Abbaye prison, but two days later she was transferred to
the Conciergerie, the prison that adjoined the seat of the Tribunal révolutionnaire
(Revolutionary Tribunal). From her cell, Corday wrote on 15 July to the Comité de
sûreté générale (Committee of General Security), in which general police powers
were vested, requesting that a miniaturist be sent for a portrait sitting.32 The
‘friends’ to whom she wanted to leave her portrait were not specified in this note,
but a second letter to the Girondin Conventionnel Jean Barbaroux, written the
next day, made clear that she was not thinking of a private memorial, for she
informed him of her intention ‘de faire hommage de mon portrait au département du
Calvados’ (‘to present my portrait to the département of Calvados’).33 Expelled
from the National Convention, Barbaroux had sought refuge in Caen, and Corday
planned to send her portrait to his circle of Girondins back home. Her letter to the
Committee of General Security was left without answer, but it was read before the
Revolutionary Tribunal where Corday stood trial on 17 July. A few weeks later
Jacques-Louis David was to become a member of the Committee of General
Security to which she had written, and Corday might have encountered no fewer
than five artists serving among the jurors of the Revolutionary Tribunal, though
the latter had yet to be re-organized as an efficient instrument of terror.34 Among
the audience at the trial, however, was a painter who tried to make a sketch of
Corday, the Paris newspaper Thermomètre du jour reported a week later:
While she was being interrogated, a painter said to be the citizen Havre, pupil of David, took
her likeness; she became aware of this. Go on, she said to him, do not worry about me changing
my pose.35
This ‘Havre’ is none other than Jean-Jacques Hauer (plate 5.6), even though he
certainly never studied under David.36
A number of other painters claimed to have sketched the assassin in the
courtroom while one artist (Brard) was honest enough to admit that he had only
glimpsed Corday as she was being taken to the guillotine early in the evening
although this did not prevent him from depicting her, knife in hand, next to the
famous bathtub.37 One of the artists in the courtroom was François Garnerey,
who indeed was a student of David, which may account for the journal’s
suggestion that Hauer had studied under this master.38 Another newspaper,
however, the Journal de Perlet, specified that Hauer had even been given an
improvised sitting with the murderess right after her condemnation:
He was admitted [to her cell] in the interval that separated her judgement from the execution.
It was there where he completed the drawing he had made when sitting in the audience.39
This sitting was cut short by the arrival of the executioner after some sixty to
ninety minutes, and the initiative had been taken by Corday herself, as Duval
pointed out:
She had him called into the room in which she had been confined to await the execution. She
asked to see the portrait, found that its resemblance was not quite exact, and offered, in order
to finish it, to sit for him during the little time left for her to live.40
& ASSOCIATION OF ART HISTORIANS 2007 255L O W A R T, P O P U L A R I M A G E R Y A N D C I V I C C O M M I T M E N T I N T H E F R E N C H R E V O L U T I O N
Hauer would hardly have been given permission to be incarcerated with
Corday if he had not enjoyed a solid reputation as an officer of the National
Guard in Marat’s own section. Though there is no way of telling whether he was
serving as the adjutant of his battalion in July, it is evident that his rank must have
been that of an officer throughout 1793. This standing within the revolutionary
militia granted him a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity: the last chance to draw a
likeness of the exceptional woman about whom everyone in Paris was talking.
When Corday was taken to the
guillotine, Hauer left the Revolu-
tionary Tribunal with a drawing,
usually assumed to be the half-length
composition now in the Musée
Lambinet.41 Whether finished during
this sitting or derived from a first study
now lost, this drawing clearly served as
the basis for Hauer’s well-known oil
painting of Corday (plate 5.6).
The day before Corday’s trial
Marat’s embalmed corpse was
displayed in the assembly hall of the
Cordeliers Club in a solemn ceremony
devised by David as a first step to turn
Marat into a martyr saint of the Revo-
lution. This worked all the better
because a model for his transforma-
tion was readily at hand: on 20
January 1793 the Conventionnel Louis-
5.6 Jean-Jacques Hauer, Charlotte Corday, 1793. Michel Le Peletier de Saint-Fargeau
Oil on canvas, 60 47 cm. Versailles: Musée had been stabbed in a restaurant by a
national du château. former royal guard for having voted
for the death of the king. On 29 March
David offered the Convention his (now-lost) Le Peletier de Saint-Fargeau on his
Deathbed, which was hung with great ceremony above the President’s chair.42
Within a week or two after 13 July, publishers disseminated a multitude of
engraved effigies of Marat, mostly derived from existing portraits.43 New effigies
were produced as rapidly: Corday was being interrogated in an adjacent room on
the evening of 13 July when the sculptor Pierre-Nicolas Beauvallet arrived at the
crime scene to take a death mask for a bust of the victim (whereabouts
unknown).44 The next morning a deputation from the Contrat-Social section was
allowed to speak before the National Convention, addressing David, who
promised to paint what was to become his famous Marat:
Where are you, David? You have passed on to posterity the effigy of Le Peletier dying for his
country; there is yet another picture to be painted.45
From the moment of his death the memory of Marat was inevitably linked to
that of Corday. She was a heroine to the moderates, a monster to the radicals, and
256 & ASSOCIATION OF ART HISTORIANS 2007L O W A R T, P O P U L A R I M A G E R Y A N D C I V I C C O M M I T M E N T I N T H E F R E N C H R E V O L U T I O N
an object of curiosity to both. The date 13 July 1793 created an insatiable appetite
for images, but any depiction of Corday would inevitably become part of what
Jacques Guilhaumou has described as a ‘war of portraits’.46 On 21 July sectionary
representatives in the department of Paris discussed ways to counter ‘tous les
contre-révolutionnaires, les modérés, les fédéralistes’ (‘all the counter-revolutionaries,
the moderates, the federalists’), who were writing eulogies to the assassin,
deciding publicly to post an official
vilification of Corday.47 For the same
reasons a sans-culotte formerly known as
the Marquis de Sade later spoke out
against those ‘artistes trop crédules’
(‘overly credulous artists’) who had
dared to represent the murderess ‘sous
l’emblême enchanteur de la beauté’ (‘under
the enchanting mask of beauty’).48
Corday had desired to go down in
history as the heroine who killed the
most bloodthirsty of all revolutionary
leaders; any ordinary portrait would
prove that she was not the hideous
creature that the authorities claimed
her to be. Hauer did not launch
engravings based on his oil portrait,
not because it was too dangerous but
because he wanted something even
more spectacular. In the colour 5.7 Jean-Jacques-François Tassaert after Jean-
engraving executed by Pierre-Marie Alix Jacques Hauer, Charlotte Corday, 1793. Engraving,
after the drawing sketched by François 30.6 22.8 cm. Hamburg: Hamburger
Garnerey in the courtroom on 17 July Kunsthalle, Kupferstichkabinett.
Corday is shown as a young woman
who looks as harmless as in the oil portrait painted by Hauer.49 The inscription on
the engraving announces that a portrait of Marat ‘paroitra dans la même grandeur d’ici
à deux mois’ (‘will appear in the same dimensions within two months’), indicating
that her image would be counterbalanced by one of Marat.50
Details of the sitting given to Hauer received press coverage and on 27 July the
Journal de Perlet announced the appearance of a stipple engraving of Corday by
Jean-Jacques-François Tassaert after a portrait drawn by Hauer (plate 5.7). Within
four days of the sitting and the sitter’s execution, Hauer had contracted the
engraver and printer Jean-Louis Anselin, under whose supervision Tassaert was
working in the nearby rue du Théâtre-Français. The painter agreed to pay Anselin
300 livres for the engraved plate and to share the printing costs and profits in a
‘fifty-fifty’ arrangement.51 Hauer supplied his engraver with a drawing (now lost)
quite different from his oil painting: a three-quarter-length study of Corday
dressed in black and wearing a high, black conical hat.52 Corday is portrayed as a
modern Judith, clasping the knife that she had thrust deep into Marat’s chest. Her
left hand rests on her hip, adding a note of pride to the evocation of a woman
apparently so dangerous, and a tiny circular vignette below serves as a reminder
of her historical intervention. This triumphant figure might indeed be the agent
& ASSOCIATION OF ART HISTORIANS 2007 257L O W A R T, P O P U L A R I M A G E R Y A N D C I V I C C O M M I T M E N T I N T H E F R E N C H R E V O L U T I O N
of a most hideous crime, but she might equally well be a heroine of admirable
determination. Hauer and Tassaert present Corday as an extraordinary woman
capable of killing, but the rest is open to interpretation. Ambiguous images of
this kind were much in demand from the ‘muscadins’ and the ‘petites maı̂tresses’
whom the police closely monitored in the shops of print dealers, overhearing
them say that ‘jamais femme ne fut si audacieuse, si intéressante, véritable héroı̈ne’
(‘never was a woman as audacious, as interesting, as veritable a heroine’).53
It is well known that David took two and a half months to paint his Marat, and
presented it to the public in the courtyard of the Louvre on 16 October 1793, the
day Queen Marie-Antoinette was sent to the guillotine.54 The Salon opened its
doors barely four weeks after Marat’s death, and Hauer enjoyed a short-lived
fame. His Assassination of Marat exhibited at the Salon two months before David
presented his more famous painting, is lost, but a replica, dated 1794,
has survived (plate 5.1).55 A kind of revolutionary cabinet-piece, Hauer’s
Assassination of Marat shows Corday, knife in hand, about to leave Marat’s
apartment, looking back on the bloodstained corpse. The figure of Corday is
close to that in the engraving by Tassaert, even though in the painting she
wears a white dress. Only her physiognomy can claim an authenticity derived
from the sitting of 17 July 1793.
The public display of this composition has recently been deemed ‘a consid-
erable risk to the artist’.56 But the painter did not take sides, following the
strategy he had employed for the engraving.57 In Hauer’s modest history
painting, Corday has accomplished the action she had been resolved to carry out.
Whatever opinions he may have held, Hauer did not encourage any particular
interpretation and visualized the assassination as it might have taken place,
deliberately undercutting the conventions of history painting by leaving it open
to interpretation. Marat’s assassination was immediately recognized as a major
episode in the French Revolution’s contemporary, or ‘modern’, history. Its
depiction, therefore, was not controversial unless the event was exploited to
create an apotheosis of Corday. Among the entrants for the Robespierrist art
competition of April 1794 at the height of the Terror the title of a painting Marat
assassiné par Charlotte Corday (untraced) by Jean-Louis Messier suggested that this
particular artist had no reservations about including a murderess in a painting
submitted to a state jury.58
David certainly sided with the radical Jacobins, but he was facing the task of
painting a pendant to his Le Peletier de Saint-Fargeau on his Deathbed (now lost) at the
instigation of a pro-Maratist deputation, destined to be hung alongside his first
martyr portrait in the National Convention. From the moment of its conception
David’s representation of Marat had never been intended to depict the assassi-
nation. There was no place for Corday in David’s painting, just as there had been
no question of introducing Philippe Pâris, the assassin of Le Peletier, in the first
painting of a stabbed Conventionnel.59 At the Salon of 1793 David’s pendants
were only indirectly present through the drawing of Anatole Devosge after the Le
Peletier (plate 5.8), but a critic of the original indicates that the reception was at an
aesthetic rather than exclusively political register: ‘Ce sujet moderne est traité avec
toute la noblesse et le sentiment de l’antique.’ (‘This modern subject is treated with all
the nobility and sentiment of the antique.’)60 Hauer had treated a modern
subject, too, but he stayed within the limits of revolutionary history that David
258 & ASSOCIATION OF ART HISTORIANS 2007L O W A R T, P O P U L A R I M A G E R Y A N D C I V I C C O M M I T M E N T I N T H E F R E N C H R E V O L U T I O N
5.8 Anatole Devosges after Jacques-Louis David, The Death of Lepeletier de
Saint-Fargeau, 1793. Pencil, 46.7 40 cm. Dijon: Musée des beaux-arts.
transcended. David charged his depiction of a corpse with a plethora of visual as
well as textual allusions: blood dripping from the sword which hangs on a single
hair above the victim, the name of the murderer engraved on the blade, the words
‘Je vote la mort du tyran’ written on the sheet of paper pierced by the sword. These
allusions generate a meaning absent in Hauer’s more modest contribution for he
created a painting which was sans-culotte in style but not in content. David’s Le
Peletier, on the other hand, was conceived as an ‘unambiguous piece of Jacobin
propaganda’61 – as was his Marat.
Another of the numerous newcomers in the overcrowded Salon of 1793 was
Auguste Sandoz, who exhibited Le portrait de Marat next to Le portrait de Marie-Anne
Cordey [sic], which were put on display only a few weeks after the opening of the
Salon.62 Both paintings are generally considered to be lost, but I would like to
identify them as an anonymous pair of small portraits at the Musée Carnavalet
which are the portraits of Marat and Corday, the only pair known in oils (plates
5.9 and 5.10).63 Sandoz worked for an engraver, François Bonneville, who claimed
to have drawn Corday ‘d’après nature’ (‘after nature’), publishing three portraits of
her, one of which was announced in the press on 13 September, while a second
& ASSOCIATION OF ART HISTORIANS 2007 259L O W A R T, P O P U L A R I M A G E R Y A N D C I V I C C O M M I T M E N T I N T H E F R E N C H R E V O L U T I O N
5.9 Auguste Sandoz (attrib.), Charlotte Corday, 1793. Oil on canvas, 39.5 33.5 cm. Paris: Musée
Carnavalet.
5.10 Auguste Sandoz (attrib.), Jean-Paul Marat, 1793. Oil on canvas, 39.5 33.5 cm. Paris: Musée
Carnavalet.
was clearly modelled after the portrait that Tassaert had engraved after Hauer.64
Sandoz engraved a third print for this publisher which combined elements from
Hauer and Bonneville; he executed a portrait of Marat a few weeks before the
assassination, which in turn was modelled on a portrait by a competent
draughtsman closely attached to the print market, Claude-Louis Desrais.65 While
such a confusing genealogy is quite typical for engravings executed and printed in
haste (often trying to add an element of variation to whatever engraved or
original portrait was reproduced), the Carnavalet pendants draw freely on this
variety of disparate sources. If the physiognomy of Corday was anonymized in the
process, that of Marat became all the more accentuated.
Similarly to Hauer’s Death of Marat, the portrait at the Carnavalet (plate 5.9)
shows Corday at the moment after the killing, knife in hand, looking down on the
expiring figure, but this is a historicized portrait not a history painting. The bust
of Le Peletier de Saint-Fargeau on top of an open writing desk puts Corday in
ideological perspective and Marat within the martyrology of the Revolution.66
Even though Corday, regarding Marat with innocence mixed with disgust, fits
even better into the traditional iconography of Judith than she does in any of
Hauer’s representations, the agitator is not depicted as a modern Holofernes. Le
Peletier’s distinctive profile reappears in the pendant (plate 5.10) which shows
Marat at his writing desk, holding a red phrygian cap in his left hand, and looking
at the same bust of the assassinated Conventionnel, whose fate prefigured his
own. Unlike Hauer, Sandoz unmistakeably took sides, offering a rather simple
solution to the definition of martyrdom, solved by David once his Marat was
placed alongside his earlier Le Peletier de Saint-Fargeau, first on top of sarcophagi in
260 & ASSOCIATION OF ART HISTORIANS 2007L O W A R T, P O P U L A R I M A G E R Y A N D C I V I C C O M M I T M E N T I N T H E F R E N C H R E V O L U T I O N
the Louvre courtyard, then inside the National Convention. In a paradoxical
‘swapping’ of contexts, however, ‘low’ art was exhibited in the artistic sphere of
the once élitist Salon, and ‘high’ displayed in the context of radically democratic
politics.67
T H E R O YA L FA M I L Y
Hauer was a battalion officer in the year that the moderates lost their battle
against the advocates of the Terror, and within the framework of Soboul’s history
of the sans-culottes as much as in the light of more recent discussions, this citizen-
artist must be numbered among the activist cadre of bourgeois-turned-militant.
With the outbreak of the war against Austria, the Parisian National Guard
underwent considerable transformation, the most important aspect of which was
the opening of its ranks to the poor by order of the municipal authorities on 17
July 1792.68 In 1793 Hauer was a battalion commander’s adjutant and he no
longer served in the showy bourgeois militia whose members he had painted in
the group portrait early in the Revolution (see plate 5.2). His commanding
general, Lafayette, had defected to the Austrians in August 1792, and only four
weeks later National guardsmen of Hauer’s section formed the core of one of the
volunteer battalions which were hastily pieced together in Paris, eventually
marching off to the Ardennes.69 Hauer’s remaining unit must now have resem-
bled something of a genuine sans-culotte militia, an armed force short of uniforms
and rifles, in part only fitted out with pikes and placed under the direct command
of the local Comité révolutionnaire (Revolutionary Committee). The electorate and
administrative personnel of his section, among them a number of artists, showed
a remarkable stability until the general assembly and its committees were finally
‘purged’ of suspected moderates in September 1793.70 Half a year later, part of the
section’s new commissaires were replaced again when the sectionary committees
which, hitherto, had acted almost entirely independently were brought under
control by the National Convention.71
After 27 July 1794 (9 Thermidor of the Year II, according to the republican
calendar), the reign of Terror ended in a massacre among its leaders in the two
executive committees of the National Convention.72 David, artist member of the
Comité de sûreté générale, escaped death, spending the rest of the year in prison, but
some ten artists who had held municipal offices went straight to the guillotine.73
Sectionary committees were scrutinized for ‘Robespierrists’, ‘Terrorists’ and
‘Jacobins’, but only after the uprisings of April and May 1795 were their former
rank and file hard hit by recurrent waves of repression which continued well into
the Consulate.74 For example, the engraver Jean-Marie Mixelle, from the Section
de Marat, was arrested on 15 May 1795 and denounced for having tried to defend
Robespierre on the night of 9 Thermidor.75 Given that Hauer held a comparatively
high position in the sectionary militia, it seems rather surprising that none of the
denunciations, arrests and disarmaments so frequent in the course of revolu-
tionary events seemed to taint the painter’s police record.76
Hauer took part in the next Salon exhibition yet none of the paintings he
displayed in 1795 have survived. The livret of this first Salon since the end of the
Terror contains short descriptions of two pendants whose subjects are the war
effort in town and country. A National Forge, a painting of workers happily singing
patriotic songs as they produce rifle barrels must have resembled a pre-industrial
& ASSOCIATION OF ART HISTORIANS 2007 261L O W A R T, P O P U L A R I M A G E R Y A N D C I V I C C O M M I T M E N T I N T H E F R E N C H R E V O L U T I O N
workshop idyll of almost nostalgic qualities.77 Most national manufactures had
already been closed under the Thermidorian Convention, and the production of
arms, uniforms and supplies was being handed back to private contractors. In A
Farm, Hauer depicted the departure of a young farmer called to arms.78 This, too,
was patriotic propaganda that was slightly out of date; another artistic outsider
named Petit-Coupray had
already shown a similar work in
the Salon of 1793, when it was
described at length in the
livret.79 The army raised by the
Jacobin levée en masse in 1793
remained the nation’s principal
fighting strength for the next
couple of years, and a regular
draft system was introduced
only later.80 Given that Hauer
strove to exploit the patriotic
sentiments which survived the
Terror, a group of four compo-
sitions not publicly exhibited by
the artist seems even more
enigmatic, as their subjects
were taken from the ordeal
suffered by the royal family. If
we regard these paintings as
political statements, they seem
to contradict much of what has
been said about this citizen-
artist so far. Was Hauer a
royalist sympathizer, as has
5.11 Jean-Jacques Hauer, The Last Confession of Louis XVI, recently been suggested in
1793. Oil on canvas, 32.5 34.5 cm. Versailles: Musée relation to this puzzling part of
Lambinet. his œuvre?81
Thermidor entailed a break
with the ideology of republican radicalism. The dismantling of its repressive
apparatus involuntarily gave rise to a renewed royalism, culminating in a full-
blown uprising in Paris, put down in October 1795 at the cost of several hundred
lives. Hauer was not alone in contributing to the imagery of the royal family in
the aftermath of Thermidor, but two of his four compositions were apparently
painted before the end of the Terror (if they were not deliberately pre-dated by the
painter). The Last Confession of Louis XVI (plate 5.11) may well be the first oil painting
of its kind produced in Paris.82 Hauer’s cabinet-piece shows the king, sentenced to
death, in front of a candle-lit crucifix next to the Abbé Edgeworth de Firmont on
the night before his execution on 21 January 1793.83 The king had been put to
death in the name of the people, but Hauer depicted a moment least suited to
inspire any kind of regicidal enthusiasm. When depicting Marat and Corday in
the same year the artist preferred not to take sides, but the assassination of the
‘Ami du peuple’ (‘Friend of the people’) was an event of historical importance. The
262 & ASSOCIATION OF ART HISTORIANS 2007L O W A R T, P O P U L A R I M A G E R Y A N D C I V I C C O M M I T M E N T I N T H E F R E N C H R E V O L U T I O N
choice of this scene of privacy and devotion in a prison cell meant putting all the
emphasis on the king. Within months of Louis’s beheading, English engravers
flooded the London market with sentimental compositions in a similar vein.84
Among French émigré artists, Henri-Pierre Danloux painted a scene of royal
introspection close to Hauer’s in 1795, showing the imprisoned monarch writing
his testament (plate 5.12), and in 1796 Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun planned to repre-
sent a subject that she aptly described as ‘un des moments touchants et solennels’ (‘one
of those touching and solemn moments’) preceding the death of Louis XVI and
Marie-Antoinette.85
If the political ideas held by a single painter in Paris are of limited interest,
his four royalist subjects, combined with what is known about his republican
commitment, raise larger questions about the relation between an artist and his
work in times of revolution. Nothing is known about Hauer’s clientele, but even
5.12 Henri-Pierre Danloux, Louis XVI Writing his Testament, 1795. Oil on
canvas, 155 119 cm. Versailles: Musée national du château.
& ASSOCIATION OF ART HISTORIANS 2007 263L O W A R T, P O P U L A R I M A G E R Y A N D C I V I C C O M M I T M E N T I N T H E F R E N C H R E V O L U T I O N
an artist of his modest abilities did not work for his own pleasure. When
contracting Anselin and Tassaert for the engraving of Corday, he had business in
mind, and the replicas of some of his paintings indicate that they were intended
for purchasers. By staying away from sectionary committees, Hauer did not
present himself as an extremist, but his status as an elected capitain aide-majeur
(adjutant) of a sectionary battalion in 1793 makes him an unlikely royalist
sympathizer. Yet this is the year, before any other painter in Paris dared to do so,
that Hauer began to work on royal subjects in a sentimentalizing and thus
counter-revolutionary vein. After the taking of the Tuileries, the imprisonment of
the royal family and the proclamation of the Republic, such images were not
specifically banned, though all feudal heraldry and titles (typically enumerated in
the inscriptions for engraved portraits) were declared illegal. A police report in
March 1793 stated that print dealers were permitted to sell any kind of portrait as
long as they refrained from ‘accompagner l’effigie des ci-devants de titres qu’ils n’ont
plus’ (‘accompanying the effigies of ‘‘ci-devants’’ with titles they no longer
bear’).86
Over the course of the 1793 all distinction between these nominally legal
images and their potentially illegal inscriptions was put aside, and the shops of
print dealers, especially along the rue de Saint-Jacques, came to be observed
closely by the Committee of Public Welfare of the department of Paris, whose
frequent seizures indicate that even under the Terror there was no lack of royal
imagery in the capital.87 These seizures, however, were largely composed of
engravings produced in the years before or re-printed from existing plates. The
most notable exception was the Testament de Louis XVI, an anonymous engraving
with the text of the king’s last will, crowned with his portrait medallion. When
published within a week of his execution, the impact of this print seems to have
taken the revolutionary authorities by surprise, but the mistake was made only
once.88 With their confinement in the Temple, the production of painted
portraits of members of the royal family came to a sudden end, save for a few
exceptions by Joseph-Marie Vien fils and Alexandre Kucharski.89 Under the loi des
suspects, one of the judicial foundations to the reign of Terror from September
1793 to July 1794, even the possession of miniature portraits of members of the
royal family was not without danger, for if an accused carried such a portrait
when arrested as a suspect, the Revolutionary Tribunal could not fail but regard
this as a proof of counter-revolutionary sympathies.90 The clandestine market for
printed effigies of royalty theoretically held considerable risks, too, but only one
publisher is known to have lost his life.91 Prohibition created a lucrative business
for the dealers, simply because prices for anything illegal but much in demand
rose as the pressure exerted by the police authorities increased.
The overthrow of the Robespierrist regime abruptly ended the most militant
phase of the Revolution; from then on, the remaining radicals were most feared
by the National Convention. On 31 October 1794, only three months after Ther-
midor, the engraver and print dealer Jean-Baptiste Vérité tentatively submitted a
production for official registration which had been modelled on the English
imagery of royalist sentimentalism. Vérité obtained permission to print and sell
The Separation of Louis XVI from his Family, but he was cautious enough to publish it
anonymously. This engraving, depicting the last reunion of the royal family in the
Temple the night before the king’s execution, was an immediate success, though
264 & ASSOCIATION OF ART HISTORIANS 2007L O W A R T, P O P U L A R I M A G E R Y A N D C I V I C C O M M I T M E N T I N T H E F R E N C H R E V O L U T I O N
5.13 Jean-Jacques Hauer, The
Separation of Louis XVI from his
Family, 1794. Oil on canvas,
53 46 cm. Paris: Musée
Carnavalet.
the claim that 50,000 copies had been sold seems exaggerated.92 Vérité, it seems,
was not the first to hope that the time had come to supply the market legally with
subjects taken from the less glorious, non-official part of the Revolution’s history.
Hauer’s own Separation of Louis XVI from his Family (plate 5.13) is dated ‘1794/
Germinal’, which means it was painted in March or April 1794, months before the
end of the Terror.93 Watched by a National Guardsman and gaoler, the king takes
leave of his wife, children and sister, calmly blessing the young Dauphin.
Confinement in the Temple had reduced the royal household to something of a
bourgeois model family, and Hauer presents them with an awkward, but almost
Greuze-like sentimental drama. Two replicas of this painting are known, one
dated 1795, and Hauer made an engraving of his composition.94 Maybe he was too
cautious to hand over his painting to the workshop of a professional engraver;
maybe he simply preferred not to risk the expense of a contract similar to that
with Ancelin and Tassaert for the portrait of Corday. Hauer’s sole engraving was
never officially registered and is only known in a few copies.95
The emotional appeal of Hauer’s painting is remarkably close to an English
print of the Last Interview of Louis XVI and his Family, engraved after a painting by
Charles Benazech (plate 5.14).96 This print, executed in London, appears to have
been known to the draughtsman employed by Vérité, an artist usually identified
as the young art student Pierre Bouillon.97 Once the Robespierrist régime had
been overthrown, Bouillon supplied Vérité with three more drawings of episodes
related to the fate of the royal family during the Revolution, and in two cases he
directly copied from English prints after Benazech. After the commercial success
of the first of his prints, however, the publisher was clearly discouraged from
& ASSOCIATION OF ART HISTORIANS 2007 265L O W A R T, P O P U L A R I M A G E R Y A N D C I V I C C O M M I T M E N T I N T H E F R E N C H R E V O L U T I O N continuing his series, which was ready for publication late in 1794. Claude Langlois has suggested that in portraying the circumstances of the royal family, artists were addressing a public interest in ‘what happened’, but acknowledging that any of these subjects belonging to the history of the Revolution meant re-writing it.98 Nonetheless, in 1795 Hauer painted The Separation of the Dauphin from his Mother (Paris: Musée Carnavalet) as a pendant to his Separation of Louis XVI from his Family, depicting the heir to the throne being separated from Marie- Antoinette on 3 July 1793.99 The boy’s mother, sister and aunt are shown taking leave from the king in the first of the two paintings, and even a sans-culotte gaoler with his red phrygian cap seems to be overcome by pity. As the child who had 5.14 Charles Benazech, The Separation of Louis XVI from his Family, 1794. Oil on canvas, 42 56 cm. Versailles: Musée national du château. been proclaimed Louis XVII by the king’s brothers in exile after the execution of his father, his presence in the Temple remained an embarrassment to the Thermi- dorian Convention until he succumbed to tuberculosis on 8 June 1795. By the end of the year royalist partisans in the Vendée had lost their battle; a landing of émigré troops at Quiberon had proved a disaster; and the uprising in Paris had been crushed. Because of the government’s fear of indigenous royalists, selling imagery of this kind legally remained nearly impossible for several more years. Vérité registered his prints on 20 November 1799, evidently hoping for a change in politics only a few days after the coup d’état by Bonaparte, which officially ended the Revolution. Although in March 1800 the police, it seems, seized three of the 266 & ASSOCIATION OF ART HISTORIANS 2007
L O W A R T, P O P U L A R I M A G E R Y A N D C I V I C C O M M I T M E N T I N T H E F R E N C H R E V O L U T I O N
5.15 Jean-Jacques Hauer, The Execution of Louis XVI, 1795. Oil on canvas, 80 99 cm. Private
Collection.
drawings that Vérité had commissioned from Bouillon, together with a stock of
two hundred prints, the distribution of his productions was eventually tolerated
by the authorities.100
Details of the interior of the Temple portrayed by Hauer in The Last Confession of
Louis XVI (plate 5.11), The Separation of Louis XVI from his Family (plate 5.13) and The
Separation of the Dauphin from his Mother are far from authentic, indicating that the
artist-officer never formed part of the National Guard detachments in charge of
the prison.101 Watch duties were performed by rotating units from the Parisian
sections; Georges Duval even started his National Guard service in the Temple.102
However, with the massive mobilization of the Parisian National Guard that was
to prevent unrest on the day of Louis XVI’s execution, Hauer probably became an
eye-witness at one of the Revolution’s most symbolic events. By removing the
king’s head, the blade of the guillotine on 21 January 1793 was meant to cut off
all ties with the past. Fearing unrest, General Santerre, successor to Lafayette,
expressly demanded ‘qu’il n’y ait dans les rues que des citoyens armés’ (‘that there are
only armed citizens in the streets’) that day.103 Many sections threatened to arrest
any citizen without arms, ordering women to stay indoors and (always advisable
when history is being written) to keep windows shut.
& ASSOCIATION OF ART HISTORIANS 2007 267L O W A R T, P O P U L A R I M A G E R Y A N D C I V I C C O M M I T M E N T I N T H E F R E N C H R E V O L U T I O N
The decapitation of the king was one of the great journées of the Revolution,
an historical event taking place in full view of the armed masses as much as with
their active participation. Its depiction might be used for revolutionary propa-
ganda, though it was equally well suited for royalist hagiography. Hauer’s Execu-
tion of Louis XVI (plate 5.15) of 1795 is one of the most historically accurate
evocations of the event. It turns out, however, to be a rather contradictory
performance in which the artist’s preoccupation with the splendour of the armed
citizenry in which he served is curiously at odds with the hagiographic elements
he introduced into the painting. A symmetrical composition places the guillotine
in the centre and General Santerre on horseback in the foreground, framed by
lovingly painted, orderly detachments of the National Guard to the left and of the
Gendarmerie to the right. The scenery unfolding in this painting was the same as
that represented, from a different angle, in the large engraving by Isidore
Stanislas Helman after Charles Monnet, presented to the National Convention
some ten weeks before Thermidor (plate 5.16).104 Here the fatal blade has already
fallen; on the scaffold the executioner’s aide holds the severed head aloft. A mere
detail of some importance in the print, this brutal act of public exposure was
emphasized in more blatantly republican interpretations such as Jean-Étienne
Lesueur’s submission to the Robespierrist concours of April 1794, a drawing in
which the king’s head is displayed to a crowd cheering and dancing before the
scaffold.105 Yet the meaning of this act of triumph and humiliation is ambiguous,
to say the least. In the inscriptions on a number of prints modelled after a French
etching and published abroad, the same severed head held high is defined as the
gruesome climax of a state crime committed on a public stage.106
5.16 Isidore Stanislas Helman after Charles Monnet, The Execution of Louis XVI, 1794. Engraving,
26.4 43 cm. Berlin: Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett.
268 & ASSOCIATION OF ART HISTORIANS 2007L O W A R T, P O P U L A R I M A G E R Y A N D C I V I C C O M M I T M E N T I N T H E F R E N C H R E V O L U T I O N
Hauer, however, chose to depict an episode (plate 5.15) most dear to engravers
abroad and to those holding royalist sympathies: Louis XVI is attempting to deliver
a last address, as Santerre, raising his sabre, commands the National Guard
tambours to roll their drums, and the king remains unheard. Within the group of
men on the scaffold, the king, with his name added in capital letters, is high-
lighted by his white shirt and culottes. His confessor Edgeworth, standing at the
left edge of the platform, turns his head away from the scene, crying into a
handkerchief. One of the most successful English prints after a painting by
Benazech, a much more concentrated composition in which the king tries to
speak at the moment before mounting the scaffold, was published on 1 February
1795: here Edgeworth, raising his crucifix, stands next to him, in turn addressing
his last words to this descendant of Louis IX about to die, ‘Fils de saint Louis, montez
au ciel.’107 Hauer’s composition is a compromise between conflicting aims. His
depiction of the king’s attempt to deliver an oral testament evidently clashes with
the painter’s desire to include a large number of orderly lined-up troops around
the scaffold. The Execution of Louis XVI is the only one of Hauer’s four paintings of
the royal family in which the subject could well have assumed a republican
meaning, but the artist made a point of designating the king as ‘Louis XVI’, not as
‘Louis Capet’, the subject’s official republican name included in the legend of the
Helman engraving.
What is to be made of these compositions by a revolutionary painter-officer?
Self-expression cannot be regarded a plausible motive for any artistic production
undertaken during the French Revolution. It seems probable that Hauer had, like
the publisher Vérité, fallen prey to a miscalculation, underestimating the hosti-
lity from the authorities to subjects for which a public demand might be taken
for granted. The choice of ‘patriotic’ compositions that Hauer displayed at the
Salon of 1795 was more appropriate to revolutionary civic commitment. Yet
coherence between ideology and art work was unusual, with the consistency
displayed by David until the end of the Terror being almost the singular excep-
tion. Even among his rivals there is ample proof of growing personal disillusion in
the midst of an unabating flow of pro-revolutionary productions. The state
competition of April 1794 solicited entrants from minor artists and former
academicians alike, but it is naı̈ve to assume that the works they submitted
simply bore witness to their ‘revolutionary zeal’.108 Among the most competent
history painters taking part in this competition were François-André Vincent, an
academician who had joined the Jacobin club only to be kicked out of the
national museum commission for a lack of patriotic candour in January 1794, and
Joseph-Benoı̂t Suvée, once denounced by David as ‘le plus aristocrate de son corps’
(‘the most aristocratic of his kind’), then imprisoned as a suspected counter-
revolutionary even before the last submissions were handed in.109 The post-
Thermidorian regime held fast to established republican imagery, but some of
those artists persecuted for their share in the Terror took up surprising subjects:
when spending some time in exile in Switzerland in 1796, Antoine-François
Sergent, having voted as a Conventionnel for the death of Louis XVI, produced a
colour engraving of the king’s surviving daughter Marie-Thèrese-Charlotte, who
had recently been handed over to the Austrians after two and a half years of
confinement in the Temple.110 In Paris, a miniature of this ‘Orphan of the Temple’
was painted in 1795 by Jacques-Joseph Degault (plate 5.17).111 Degault had worked
& ASSOCIATION OF ART HISTORIANS 2007 269You can also read
