Page 23 - Revolution Republique Empire Restauration

regeneration of French art as it currently was being Fig. 2
promoted by the Comte d’Angiviller, the director of
the Bâtiments du Roi. Nevertheless, while critics so dominated by David and his adherents, and, final-
praised his command of classisized form, they found ly, his imaginative approach to classical sources, par-
his work cold and expressionless. Throughout the ticularly his favourite: Ovid’s Metamorphoses.
rest of the 1780s Regnault received a series of royal
commissions for which he produced highly polished, There is no direct literary source for the subject of
assured compositions of the Death of Priam (exh. Socrates tearing Alcibiades from the arms of a cour-
Salon 1785;Amiens, Musée Picardie), the Recognition tesan, whether or not she is the famed Aspasia.
of Orestes and Iphigenia (exh. Salon 1787; Marseille, Countless primary and secondary sources though
Musée de Beaux-Arts) and the Descent from the Cross describe the characters’ intertwined lives. Regnault
(exh. Salon 1789; Paris, Louvre), all of which were certainly knew of the subject from Peyron’s painting,
admired, but not praised and by the end of the
decade it was apparent that Regnault talents would
not lie in the emotive classicism typified in the work
of David. Where Regault began to find his ‘voice’ as
a painter was in the more narrative classical and
mythological subjects, ideally featuring female
nudes, such as the present painting and his Cupid and
Psyche (1785; Angers, Musée Beaux-Arts), both of
which display the distinct characteristics that typify
Regnault’s work throughout his career: polished
draughtsmanship, a Hellenistic a approach to form, a
rich palette and an approach to tonality derived from
seventeenth century Italian painting, particularly the
work of Guido Reni.
During the 1780s, Regnault began to teach and his
students included Robert Lefèvre, Pierre Narcisse
Guérin, Merry-Joseph Blondel and Louis Hersent.
Teaching was to help Regnault through the worst
professional difficulties of the Revolution for at one
point his studio briefly rivalled David’s in popularity.
But this popularity was fleeting and soon Regnault
began to be seen less as a serious rival to David and
more as a reactionary, an ‘academic’ figure in the
pejorative sense. His abstention from the Salons only
contributed to this reputation. As Christopher Sells
points out, a more balanced assessment of Regnault’s
work would acknowledge the refinement of his tech-
nique and his notable eclecticism in an era that was

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