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After
the Revolution Antoine-Jean Gros, Painting, and Propaganda
under Napoleon Bonaparte
David O'Brien
March 2006 | 344 pgs | 9 x 11.5 | 157 Illustrations
History - European, Art History, Art Other
Hardback: $65.00 SH
ISBN-10: 0-271-02305-8
ISBN-13: 978-0-271-02305-2
Co-published with Gallimard
Napoleon
and Antoine-Jean Gros first met in 1796 in Italy where the young French
painter was working as a portraitist and attempting to recover from
the upheavals of the French Revolution. The meeting changed Gros's
life. Soon thereafter, he was making paintings —Napoleon Visiting
the Battlefield of Eylau, Napoleon Visiting the Plague-Stricken
in Jaffa, among others—that commemorated “the Corsican
upstart’s” great deeds and have come to be regarded as masterpieces
of both art and propaganda.
After
the Revolution by David O'Brien is the first account in over
a century to trace Gros’s meteoric career, from its beginnings
in Paris in David’s studio to its Napoleonic successes and
end in a mysterious suicide. Drawing on letters from the artist
to his mother, many of which O’Brien discovered, this book
gives the reader a compelling account of the opportunities and conflicts
faced by a brilliant, sensitive artist working for an increasingly
autocratic regime.
Highly
original, O’Brien’s book weaves a comprehensive biography
of Gros together with a history of the institutional machinery through
which Napoleon both encouraged and regulated the arts. Here again,
O’Brien introduces the reader to new documents, this time records
from the Archives Nationales that illuminate the personalities and
policies directing the representation of Napoleon and his era.
The
many color illustrations in After the Revolution enable the
reader to follow O’Brien’s informative analysis of the
mixing of fact and fiction in such famed paintings as the Battlefield
of Eylau. Written in a clear, engaging style, this book will
be of great interest to art historians, students of political and
military historians, and all those fascinated by Napoleon.
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 An Education
in Italy
2 Art and the New Order in France
3 Divisions and Unities in 1804
4 The Propaganda Machine
5 Eylau, Empire, and the Republic of the Arts
6 Second Thoughts
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index
David
O’Brien is Associate Professor of Art History, University
of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the author of articles on both
American and French art.
