he direction of
supine satisfaction with this material, unrelieved and unelevated by an
individual point of view, illustrated by the Brauers and Steens and
Ostades. One perceives that what he cared for was really art itself, for
the aesthetic aspect and significance of the life he painted.
Affectionate as his interest in it evidently was, he as evidently
thought of its artistic potentialities, its capability of being treated
with refinement and delicacy, and of being made to serve the ends of
beauty equally well with the conventionally beautiful material of his
fan-painting contemporaries. He looked at the world very originally
through and over those round, horn-bowed spectacles of his, with a very
shrewd and very kindly and sympathetic glance, too; quite untinctured
with prejudice or even predisposition. One can read his artistic
isolation in his countenance with a very little exercise of fancy.

VI

It is the fashion to think of David as the painter of the Revolution and
the Empire. Really he is Louis Seize. Historical critics say that he had
no fewer than four styles, but apart from obvious labels they would be
puzzled to tell to which of these styles any individual picture of his
belongs. He was from the beginning extremely, perhaps absurdly,
enamoured of the antique, and we usually associate addiction to the
antique with the Revolutionary period. But perhaps politics are slower
than the aesthetic movement; David's view of art and practice of painting
were fixed unalterably under the reign of philosophism. Philosophism, as
Carlyle calls it, is the ruling spirit of his work. Long before the
Revolution--in 1774--he painted what is still his most characteristic
picture--"The Oath of the Horatii." His art developed and grew
systematized under the Republic and the Empire; but Napoleon, whose
genius crystallized the elements of everything in all fields of
intellectual effort with which he occupied himself, did little but
formally "consecrate," in French phrase, the art of the painter of "The
Oath of the Horatii" and the originator and designer of the "Fete" of
Robespierre's "Etre Supreme." Spite of David's subserviency and that of
others, he left painting very much where he found it. And he found it in
a state of reaction against the Louis Quinze standards. The break with
these, and with everything _regence_, came with Louis Seize, Chardin
being a notable exception and standing quite apart from the general
drift of th