Emulation: David, Drouais, and Girodet in the Art of Revolutionary France; New Edition

by Thomas E. Crow

This fascinating and elegant book tells the story of five painters at the center of events in Revolutionary France: Jacques-Louis David and his first cohort of precocious pupils, including the meteoric Jean-Germain Drouais and the astonishingly gifted but deeply troubled Anne-Louis Girodet. Written by a major art historian, it interprets in a new and original way the relationships between these men and the paintings they created. This new edition includes a revised introduction and incorporates the fruit of recent new research.
“Crow combines excellent formal and stylistic analysis of particular paintings with close attention to the psychological complexities and political and social contexts of the artists’ lives. He delves deeply into David’s and his students’ thematic choices, compositional strategies and personal relations in order to make his overarching political and aesthetic arguments.”—Lynn Hunt, New Republic
“A magisterial contribution to the history of art.”—Richard Cobb, The Spectator

Genres: Art, Art History, Nonfiction

372 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1995

Reviews

[Nico · Rating 4 out of 5]

Recounts the stories and most important artworks of some of the most important French Neoclassicists, examining their work through a biographical perspective. The first half of the book is more focused on David and Drouais, and the second spends a fair amount of pages on Girodet and how the former affected him. There’s also a chapter at the very end about Gericault, which I very much enjoyed.

I knocked off one star because of what I (and actual scholars, see James Smalls’s article “Making Trouble for Art History: The Queer Case of Girodet” for example) believe is an overly heteronormative judgement of some of the major works featured. The Sleep of Endymion is homoerotic at the same time as it is everything else Crow describes it as, for one, and these artists were much less rigidly heterosexual than Crow discusses here. However, this book is from 1995, and scholarship on the homoeroticism of the period really wasn’t very far along yet.

Regardless of that issue, Emulation is a deeply important piece of scholarship on its subjects which deserves its place in the bibliographies of so many articles, essays, and books that have followed in its wake.

[Robert Lukins · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great on David; brilliant on the period.

[Lauren · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting scholarly approach to the studio of David. His use of biography as evidence of his arguments is coupled with in depth discussion of social, political and institutional history. The book is a compelling argument for using biography as source material!

[Jessica · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another book I read part way in graduate school for a class, and I think I appreciate even more now.