After Poussin: French history painting (1665--1785)

This dissertation argues that Academic painters' emulation of the artistic practice of the seventeenth-century "painter-philosopher," Nicolas Poussin, is a key factor in the transformation of the premises and ambitions of high Academic painting during the ancien regime. An analysis of three such paintings forms the core of this study, namely: Charles Le Brun's Entree d'Alexandre dans Babylone (1665, Musee du Louvre, Paris); Jean-Baptiste Greuze's L'empereur Severe reproche a Caracalla, son fils, d'avoir voulu l'assassiner... (1769, Musee du Louvre, Paris); and Jean-Germain Drouais' Le Christ et la Cananeenne (1784, Musee du Louvre, Paris). In spite of their stylistic differences, each painting advances a novel conception of painting that invokes specific works by Poussin, as well as his orientation to artistic and literary forms of the past more generally. A substantial portion of each chapter is devoted to demonstrating that each artist equates emulation of Poussin's representational strategies with innovation. Overall, this study places Academic artists' innovations center-stage in the story of the development of a classicizing history painting, which has long been understood to have reached its zenith in the second half of the seventeenth century, and to have re-emerged in the second half of the eighteenth century. The role that innovative interpretations of Poussin had in this well-acknowledged phenomenon has thus far been overlooked. Furthermore, scholars have failed to see how the emulation of Poussin's representational strategies enabled artists to propose a new theory of painting and to intervene in contemporary aesthetic debates. By redressing these issues, this study shows that paint was viewed as a medium in which one could intervene in intellectual history's development. Because Le Brun, Greuze and Drouais were able to propose specific painterly definitions to such institutionally and theoretically contested terms as "classicism" and "history painting," they were uniquely able to stake a definition of painting's aims based upon the self-reflexive model furnished by Poussin.