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Et toi, sage Vien, toi, David, maître illustre, Jouissez de vos succès; dans son sixième lustre, Votre élève, déjà de toutes parts cité, Auprès de vous vivra dans la postérité.
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Battle of Eylau, exhibited in 1808, Gros has given us a companion picture to the
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Plague of Jaffa : in one a visit to a hospital, in the other the inspection of a field of battle after the fight is over. The dismal grey hue of winter rests upon the white sheet of snow stretching desolately away to the horizon, only interrupted here and there by hillocks beneath which annihilated regiments sleep their last sleep. In the foreground lie dead bodies heaped together, and moaning wounded men; and in the midst of this horror of mangled limbs and corrupting flesh he, the Conqueror, the Master, the Emperor, comes to a halt, pale, his eyes turned towards the cities burning on the horizon, in his grey overcoat and small cocked hat, at the head of his staff, indifferent, inexorable, merciless as Fate.
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The classical posturing which still lingered, a disturbing element, in the Plague picture, has been put aside completely. The conventional horse from the frieze of the Parthenon, which David alone knew, has given way to the accurately observed animal, and the colouring too, in its sad harmony, has fully recovered its ancient right of giving character to the picture. It was, beyond all controversy, the chief work in the Salon of 1808, rich in remarkable pictures; neither Gérard's
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Battle of Austerlitz, nor Girodet's
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Atala,
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Napoleon before the Pyramids, at the moment when he cries,
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Soldiers, from the summit of those monuments forty centuries contemplate your actions, constitutes, in 1810, the coping-stone of the cycle. Gros alone at that time understood the epic grandeur of war. He became, also, the portrait painter of the great men from whom its events proceeded. His picture of General Masséna, with its meditative, slily tenacious expression, is the genuine portrait of a warrior; and how well is heroic, simple daring depicted in the likeness of General Lasalle, without the commonplace device of a mantle puffed out by the wind! His portrait of General Fournier Sarlovèse, at Versailles, has a freshness of colouring, the secret of which no one else possessed in those days except the two Englishmen, Lawrence and Raeburn. Gros was far in advance of his age. A painter of movement rather than of psychological analysis, he brought out character by means of general effect, and gave the essentials in a masterly way. His portraits, just as much as his historical pictures, have a stormy exposition. In David all is calculation; in Gros, fire. Almost alone among his contemporaries, he had studied Rubens, and like him gave colour the place due to it. At times there is in his pictures a natural flesh-colour and an animation which make this warm-hearted man, who has not been sufficiently appreciated, a genuine forerunner of the moderns. Surrounded as he was by orthodox Classicists, he cried in a loud voice what Prudhon had already ventured to say more timidly:
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Man is not a statue--not made of marble, but of flesh and bone.
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It is not I who am speaking to you, he would say to the pupils,
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The latter had blamed him for having taken the trouble to paint the battles of the Empire,
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instead of venturing upon those of Alexander the Great, and thus producing genuine
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Posterity requires of you good pictures out of ancient history. Who, she will cry, was better fitted to paint Themistocles? Quick, my friend! turn to your Plutarch. To depict contemporary life, which lies open before our eyes, was, he held, merely the business of minor artists, unworthy the brush of an
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And Gros, who reverenced his master, was so weak as to listen to his advice: he believed in him rather than in his own genius, in the strength of others rather than his own. He searched his Plutarch, and painted nothing more without a previous side-glance towards Brussels; introduced allegory into his
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Battle of the Pyramids ; composed in homage to David a
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Death of Sappho