Vision after the Sermon

Gauguin started off his landscape paintings in the summer en plein air but would later change when he would become inspired by the religious women. It was after this that he would later decide to do more religious style paintings.

Composition and technique

The use of color, shape, and line in Vision after the Sermon was a truly new and unique way to handle paint. Finding inspiration from Japanese woodblock prints from Hiroshige and Hokusai, which he owned, he developed the idea of non-naturalistic landscapes. He introduced the harsh reds, blacks, and whites into this painting instead of showing the actual color of the image. Even with the figures he experiments with the distortion of shape, exaggerating features and using strong contour lines instead gradual shifts in tone that most painters of this time used. The colors appear to be flat and solid, not showing very much depth, if any at all. Gauguin was trying to move away from the natural colors and ideas and move towards painting how he saw the world. The color, structure, and style of Gauguin's paintings was due to his inspiration of the Japanese prints.

Right in the middle of the image is a randomly placed tree that appears to be starting nowhere and ending nowhere. It is splitting the painting in half; creating a divide between the Breton women and Jacob battling the angel. This compositional decision also frames the main subjects of the painting. The curve in the middle part of the trunk follows the same line in the head of the most prominent nun, bringing her to attention before the rest. And where the leaves begin, they shoot out directly towards the upper right corner of the painting putting a second frame around the struggle happening with Jacob.The perspective of this painting is also purposely skewed.^[1]

"Further, it was Emile Bernard who pointed out the general influence of Japanese prints on Gauguin's work. This seems self-evident when one compares Gauguin's Vision after the Sermon to Vincent van Gogh's Trees, a copy after Hiroshige, with its diagonally placed tree and use of red. In citing Hokusai's Sumo wrestlers in The Manga, however, Bernard was being more specific. He designated them as the source of Gauguin's struggling angel and Jacob".^{[citation needed]} One can see their features, in the faces, of the women that are closer to the viewer. The scene is depicting a story from the bible in which Jacob is wrestling with the Angel. Gauguin was trying to use Brenton themes which focused on leaning towards abstraction. The women are dressed in very different white hats and seem to be the ones who have the vision that is shown in the painting. There are several colors that stand out above the rest, including the reds, black, and white; which may be a message from the artist about the grim nature of this painting. The color that would most likely catch the viewer's attention the most in this painting would be red, which in this particular painting represents the struggle that is occurring.^[2]

Vision after the Sermon Artist Paul Gauguin Year 1888 Type Oil on canvas Dimensions 72.2 cm × 91 cm (28.4 in × 35.8 in) Location National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh

Picasso Portrait of Gertrude Stein and Les Demoiselles d'Avignon

Portrait of Gertrude Stein, 1906, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City. When someone commented that Stein did not look like her portrait, Picasso replied, "She will".^[26]

Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (The Young Ladies of Avignon, and originally titled The Brothel of Avignon)^[2] is a large oil painting created in 1907 by the Spanish artist Pablo Picasso (1881–1973). The work portrays five nude female prostitutes from a brothel on Carrer d'Avinyó (Avinyó Street) in Barcelona. Each figure is depicted in a disconcerting confrontational manner and none are conventionally feminine. The women appear as slightly menacing and rendered with angular and disjointed body shapes. Three figures on the left exhibit facial features in the Iberian style of Picasso's native Spain, while the two on the right are shown with African mask-like features. The racial primitivism evoked in these masks, according to Picasso, moved him to "liberate an utterly original artistic style of compelling, even savage force."^[3][4]

In this adaptation of Primitivism and abandonment of perspective in favor of a flat, two-dimensional picture plane, Picasso makes a radical departure from traditional European painting. This proto-Cubist work is widely considered to be seminal in the early development of both Cubism and Modern art. Les Demoiselles was revolutionary and controversial, and led to wide anger and disagreement, even amongst his closest associates and friends. Matisse considered the work something of a bad joke, yet indirectly reacted to it in his 1908 Bathers with a Turtle. Braque too initially disliked the painting, yet perhaps more than anyone else, studied the work in great detail. And effectively, his subsequent friendship and collaboration with Picasso led to the Cubist revolution.^[5][6]

Before 1910 Picasso was already being recognized as one of the important leaders of Modern art alongside Henri Matisse who had been the undisputed leader of Fauvism and who was more than ten years older than he was and his contemporaries the Fauvist André Derain and the former Fauvist and fellow Cubist, Georges Braque.^[21]

In his 1992 essay Reflections on Matisse, the art critic Hilton Kramer wrote,

After the impact of Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, however, Matisse was never again mistaken for an avant-garde incendiary. With the bizarre painting that appalled and electrified the cognoscenti, which understood the Les Demoiselles was at once a response to Matisse's Le bonheur de vivre (1905–1906) and an assault upon the tradition from which it derived, Picasso effectively appropriated the role of avant-garde wild beast—a role that, as far as public opinion was concerned, he was never to relinquish.^[22]

Kramer goes on to say,

Whereas Matisse had drawn upon a long tradition of European painting—from Giorgione, Poussin, and Watteau to Ingres, Cézanne, and Gauguin—to create a modern version of a pastoral paradise in Le bonheur de vivre, Picasso had turned to an alien tradition of primitive art to create in Les Demoiselles a netherworld of strange gods and violent emotions. As between the mythological nymphs of Le bonheur de vivre and the grotesque effigies of Les Demoiselles, there was no question as to which was the more shocking or more intended to be shocking. Picasso had unleashed a vein of feeling that was to have immense consequences for the art and culture of the modern era while Matisse's ambition came to seem, as he said in his Notes of a Painter, more limited—limited that is, to the realm of aesthetic pleasure. There was thus opened up, in the very first decade of the century and in the work of its two greatest artists, the chasm that has continued to divide the art of the modern era down to our own time."^[23]

Les Demoiselles d'Avignon English: The Young Ladies of Avignon Artist Pablo Picasso Year 1907 Type Oil on canvas

The Night Café

The work has been called one of Van Gogh's masterpieces^[2] and one of his most famous.^[3]

Unlike typical Impressionist works, the painter does not project a neutral stance towards the world or an attitude of enjoyment of the beauty of nature or of the moment. The painting is an instance of Van Gogh's use of what he called "suggestive colour" or, as he would soon term it, "arbitrary colour" in which the artist infused his works with his emotions, typical of what was later called Expressionism.^[2]

The red and green of the walls and ceiling are an "oppressive combination", and the lamps are "sinister features" with orange-and-green halos, according to Nathaniel Harris. "The top half of the canvas creates its basic mood, as any viewer can verify by looking at it with one or the other half of the reproduction covered up; the bottom half supplies the 'facts.'" The thick paint adds a surreal touch of waviness to the table tops, billiard table and floor. The viewer is left with a feeling of seediness and despair, Harris wrote. "The scene might easily be banal and dispiriting; instead, it is dispiriting but also terrible."^[2]

The objects of pleasure (billiard table, wine bottles and glasses) are contrasted in the picture with the "few human beings absorbed in their individual loneliness and despair", Antonia Lant commented.^[3]

The perspective of the scene is one of its most powerful effects, according to various critics. Schapiro described the painting's "absorbing perspective which draws us headlong past empty chairs and tables into hidden depths behind a distant doorway — an opening like the silhouette of the standing figure."^[6] Lant described it as a "shocking perspectival rush, which draws us, by the converging diagonals of floorboards and billiard table, towards the mysterious, courtained doorway beyond."^[3] Harris wrote that the perspective "pitches the viewer forward into the room, towards the half-curtained private quarters, and also creates a sense of vertigo and distorted vision, familiar from nightmares."^[2] Schapiro also noted, "To the impulsive rush of these converging lines he opposes the broad horizontal band of red, full of scattered objects [...]"^[6]

The Night Café French: Le Café de nuit Artist Vincent van Gogh Year 1888 Type Oil on canvas Dimensions 72.4 cm × 92.1 cm (28.5 in × 36.3 in) Location Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven

Van Gogh, Starry Night

 -- Art historian Sven Loevgren expands on Schapiro's approach, again calling The Starry Night a "visionary painting" which "was conceived in a state of great agitation."^[50]

Even given the large number of letters Van Gogh wrote, he said very little about The Starry Night.^[12] After reporting that he had painted a starry sky in June, Van Gogh next mentioned the painting in a letter to Theo on or about 20 September 1889, when he included it in a list of paintings he was sending to his brother in Paris, referring to it as a "night study."^[27] Of this list of paintings, he wrote, "All in all the only things I consider a little good in it are the Wheatfield, the Mountain, the Orchard, the Olive trees with the blue hills and the Portrait and the Entrance to the quarry, and the rest says nothing to me"; "the rest" would include The Starry Night. When he decided to hold back three paintings from this batch in order to save money on postage, The Starry Night was one of the paintings he didn't send.^[28] Finally, in a letter to painter Émile Bernard from late November, 1889, Van Gogh referred to the painting as a "failure."^[29]

Van Gogh argued with Bernard and, especially, Paul Gauguin as to whether one should paint from nature, as Van Gogh preferred,^[30] or paint what Gauguin called "abstractions":^[31] paintings conceived in the imagination, or de tête.^[32] In the letter to Bernard, Van Gogh recounted his experiences when Gauguin lived with him for nine weeks in the fall and winter of 1888: "When Gauguin was in Arles, I once or twice allowed myself to be led astray into abstraction, as you know. . . . But that was delusion, dear friend, and one soon comes up against a brick wall. . . . And yet, once again I allowed myself to be led astray into reaching for stars that are too big—another failure—and I have had my fill of that."^[33] Van Gogh here is referring to the expressionistic swirls which dominate the upper center portion of The Starry Night.^[34]

Theo referred to these pictorial elements in a letter to Vincent dated 22 October 1889: "I clearly sense what preoccupies you in the new canvases like the village in the moonlight [The Starry Night] or the mountains, but I feel that the search for style takes away the real sentiment of things."^[29] Vincent responded in early November, "Despite what you say in your previous letter, that the search for style often harms other qualities, the fact is that I feel myself greatly driven to seek style, if you like, but I mean by that a more manly and more deliberate drawing. If that will make me more like Bernard or Gauguin, I can't do anything about it. But am inclined to believe that in the long run you'd get used to it." And later in the same letter, he wrote, "I know very well that the studies drawn with long, sinuous lines from the last consignment weren't what they ought to become, however I dare urge you to believe that in landscapes one will continue to mass things by means of a drawing style that seeks to express the entanglement of the masses."^[35]

But although Van Gogh periodically defended the practices of Gauguin and Bernard, each time he inevitably repudiated them^[36] and continued with his preferred method of painting from nature.^[37] Like the impressionists he had met in Paris, especially Claude Monet, Van Gogh also favored working in series. He had painted his series of sunflowers in Arles, and he painted the series of cypresses and wheat fields at Saint-Rémy. The Starry Night belongs to this latter series,^[38] as well as to a small series of nocturnes he initiated in Arles.

Soon after his arrival in Arles in February, 1888, Van Gogh wrote to Theo, "I . . . need a starry night with cypresses or—perhaps above a field of ripe wheat; there are some really beautiful nights here." That same week, he wrote to Bernard, "A starry sky is something I should like to try to do, just as in the daytime I am going to try to paint a green meadow spangled with dandelions."^[40] He compared the stars to dots on a map and mused that, as one takes a train to travel on earth, "we take death to reach a star."^[41] Although at this point in his life Van Gogh was disillusioned by religion,^[42][43] he appears not to have lost his belief in an afterlife. He voiced this ambivalence in a letter to Theo after having painted Starry Night Over the Rhone, confessing to a "tremendous need for, shall I say the word—for religion—so I go outside at night to paint the stars."^[44]

He wrote about existing in another dimension after death and associated this dimension with the night sky. "It would be so simple and would account so much for the terrible things in life, which now amaze and wound us so, if life had yet another hemisphere, invisible it is true, but where one lands when one dies."^[45] "Hope is in the stars," he wrote, but he was quick to point out that "earth is a planet too, and consequently a star, or celestial orb."^[40] And he stated flatly that The Starry Night was "not a return to the romantic or to religious ideas."^[13]

Noted art historian Meyer Schapiro highlights the expressionistic aspects of The Starry Night, saying it was created under the "pressure of feeling" and that it is a "visionary [painting] inspired by a religious mood."^[46] Schapiro theorizes that the "hidden content"^[46] of the work makes reference to the New Testament book of Revelation, revealing an "apocalyptic theme of the woman in pain of birth, girded with the sun and moon and crowned with stars, whose newborn child is threatened by the dragon."^[47] (Schapiro, in the same volume, also professes to see an image of a mother and child in the clouds in Landscape with Olive Trees,^[48] painted at the same time and often regarded as a pendant to The Starry Night.)^[49]

Art historian Sven Loevgren expands on Schapiro's approach, again calling The Starry Night a "visionary painting" which "was conceived in a state of great agitation."^[50] He writes of the "hallucinatory character of the painting and its violently expressive form," although he takes pains to note that the painting was not executed during one of Van Gogh's incapacitating breakdowns.^[51] Loevgren compares Van Gogh's "religiously inclined longing for the beyond" to the poetry of Walt Whitman.^[52] He calls The Starry Night "an infinitely expressive picture which symbolizes the final absorption of the artist by the cosmos" and which "gives a never-to-be-forgotten sensation of standing on the threshold of eternity."^[53] Loevgren praises Schapiro's "eloquent interpretation" of the painting as an apocalyptic vision^[54] and advances his own symbolist theory with reference to the eleven stars in one of Joseph's dreams in the Old Testament book of Genesis.^[55] Loevgren asserts that the pictorial elements of The Starry Night "are visualized in purely symbolic terms" and notes that "the cypress is the tree of death in the Mediterranean countries."^[56]

Artist Vincent van Gogh Year 1889 Catalogue F612; JH1731 Type Oil on canvas Dimensions 73.7 cm × 92.1 cm (29 in × 36 ¹⁄₄ in) Location Museum of Modern Art, New York City

Constable and Friedrich

From its inception,  Romanticism was preoccupied with landscape.  Abandoning completely the historical scenes,  religious subjects,  and to a large extent portraiture,  romantic artists turned to nature for inspiration and as a vehicle by which their emotions could be expressed.

The first of the artists to take up landscape was John Constable  (1776-1837).  After spending some years working in the picturesque tradition of landscape,  especially as practiced by the popular works of his fellow countryman Gainsborough, Constable developed his own original treatment.  He sought to render scenery more directly and realistically, thus carrying on but modifying in an individual way the tradition inherited from17th-century Dutch landscape painters. Just as his contemporary William Wordsworth rejected the artificial "poetic diction" of his predecessors, so Constable turned away from the pictorial conventions of 18th-century landscape painters.  The result was a breathtakingly fresh look at the beauties of the world around us.

Many art historians consider Constable a transitional figure, with roots firmly in the Dutch and English landscape school of the 17th and 18th centuries.  Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840) is clearly from another species entirely.  His paintings are generally landscapes,  it is true,  but landscapes which are clearly designed to express the emotional and psychic  state of the artist.

In these pictures,  nature is transformed in order to reveal inner values,  to portray the deepest emotions of the painter.  Typically,  Caspar David Friedrich uses nature to get at the really important goal of examining man.

http://www.bc.edu/bc_org/avp/cas/his/CoreArt/art/romland.html

The Tetschen Altar, or The Cross in the Mountains (1807). 115 × 110.5 cm. Galerie Neue Meister, Dresden. Friedrich's first major work, the piece breaks with the traditions of representing the crucifixion in altarpieces by depicting the scene as a landscape.

Caspar David Friedrich (September 5, 1774 – May 7, 1840) was a 19th-century German Romantic landscape painter, generally considered the most important German artist of his generation.^[2] He is best known for his mid-period allegorical landscapes which typically feature contemplative figures silhouetted against night skies, morning mists, barren trees or Gothic ruins. His primary interest as an artist was the contemplation of nature, and his often symbolic and anti-classical work seeks to convey a subjective, emotional response to the natural world. Friedrich's paintings characteristically set a human presence in diminished perspective amid expansive landscapes, reducing the figures to a scale that, according to the art historian Christopher John Murray, directs "the viewer's gaze towards their metaphysical dimension".^[3]

^{http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caspar_David_Friedrich}

The Hay Wain Constable (1821)

Insane Woman

Insane Woman is an 1822 oil on canvas painting by Théodore Géricault in a series of work Géricault did on the mentally ill. It is housed in the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon, France.

Mental aberration and irrational states of mind could not fail to interest artists against Enlightenment rationality. Géricault, like many of his contemporaries, examined the influence of mental states on the human face and shared the belief, common in his time, that a face more accurately revealed character, especially in madness and at the moment of death. He made many studies of the inmates in hospitals and institutions for the criminally insane, and he studied the heads of guillotine victims.

Géricault's Insane Woman, her mouth tense, her eyes red-rimmed with suffering, is one of several portraits he made of the mentally ill that have a peculiar hypnotic power. These portraits present the physical facts with astonishing authenticity, especially in contrast to earlier idealized commissioned portraiture.^[1]

Géricault and Delacroix

It was at the École des Beaux-Arts that Delacroix met Théodore Géricault, whose Romantic canvases, such as The Raft of the Medusa (Plate 15), made an impact on him. Delacroix posed as one of the foreground figures in this work, which was somewhat controversial due to its heroic and realistic treatment of a contemporary news story of French naval troops and settlers, shipwrecked on their way to Senegal and signalling to another vessel for help. The painting's departure from grand, literary and classical themes was regarded as a disturbing challenge to tradition, given its adoption of the scale and importance of history painting. The graphic, realistic portrayal of human suffering was an implicit challenge to classical idealisation. In order to draw the bodies of the figures, the artist had made studies from actual corpses and severed limbs. Nevertheless, Géricault's essential inspiration remained the academic, classical nude (he had seen and admired work by Michelangelo). What he achieved was a radical reworking of classical norms. He massed together writhing figures into a composition, marked by dramatic diagonal lines, that threatens to topple the 'stable' classical pyramidal figure groups it contains (one surmounted by a signalling figure, the other by a mast). The final result, a muscular and energetic reinterpretation of a classical style, provided an example that was to be well taken by Delacroix.It was at the École des Beaux-Arts that Delacroix met Théodore Géricault, whose Romantic canvases, such as The Raft of the Medusa (Plate 15), made an impact on him. Delacroix posed as one of the foreground figures in this work, which was somewhat controversial due to its heroic and realistic treatment of a contemporary news story of French naval troops and settlers, shipwrecked on their way to Senegal and signalling to another vessel for help. The painting's departure from grand, literary and classical themes was regarded as a disturbing challenge to tradition, given its adoption of the scale and importance of history painting. The graphic, realistic portrayal of human suffering was an implicit challenge to classical idealisation. In order to draw the bodies of the figures, the artist had made studies from actual corpses and severed limbs. Nevertheless, Géricault's essential inspiration remained the academic, classical nude (he had seen and admired work by Michelangelo). What he achieved was a radical reworking of classical norms. He massed together writhing figures into a composition, marked by dramatic diagonal lines, that threatens to topple the 'stable' classical pyramidal figure groups it contains (one surmounted by a signalling figure, the other by a mast). The final result, a muscular and energetic reinterpretation of a classical style, provided an example that was to be well taken by Delacroix.

http://www.open.edu/openlearn/history-the-arts/history/history-art/delacroix/content-section-3.2

Jeune orpheline au cimetière

I remember this painting at the Louvre. I think it is one of only a few I took a picture of in the section which I breezed through too quickly.

http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeune_orpheline_au_cimeti%C3%A8re

Jeune orpheline au cimetière

Artiste

Eugène Delacroix

Date

Vers 1824

Type

Huile sur toile

Dimensions
(H × L)

65,5 × 54,3 cm

Localisation

Musée du Louvre, Paris

Propriétaire

Étienne Moreau-Nélaton et État français +/-

Numéro d'inventaire

RF 1652

The Death of Marat

From the outset,  David was in active sympathy with the Revolution,  and his majestic historical paintings (especially the Oath of the Horatii,  Death of Socrates,  and Brutus's Sons) were universally hailed as artistic demands for political action.  He orchestrated the great festival of the people,  14 July 1790,  and designed uniforms, banners,  triumphal arches,  and inspirational props for the Jacobin club's propaganda.  He was elected a Deputy from the city of Paris,  and voted for the execution of Louis XVI.  He was active in numerous agencies of the reign of terror,  and historians have identified  more than 300 victims for whom David signed execution orders.  He was president of the Jacobin club on the day when his good friend and fellow Jacobin,  Jean-Paul Marat,  was killed.

Marat,  friend of Robespierre,  Jacobin deputy to the Convention, and editor-in-chief of L'Ami du Peuple, was a fiery orator; he was also a violent man, quick to take offense. Some saw him as an intransigent patriot; for others he was merely a hateful demagogue  On July 13, 1793, a young Royalist from Caen, Charlotte Corday, managed, by a clever subterfuge, to gain entry into his apartment. When Marat agreed to receive her, she stabbed him in his bathtub, where he was accustomed to sit hour after hour treating the disfiguring skin disease from which he suffered.

David, Marat's colleague in the Convention, had visited him only the day before the murder,  and he recalled the setting of the room vividlly,  the tub,  the sheet,  the green rug, the wooden packing case,  and above all,  the pen of the journalist.  He saw in Marat a model of antique "virtue." The day after the murder, David was invited by the Convention to make arrangements for the funeral ceremony, and to paint Marat's portrait.  He accepted with enthusiasm, but the decomposed state of the body made a true-to-life representation of the victim impossible. This circumstance, coupled with David's own emotional state, resulted in the creation of this idealized image.

Marat is dying: his eyelids droop, his head weighs heavily on his shoulder, his right arm slides to the ground. His body, as painted by David, is that of a healthy man, still young. The scene inevitably calls to mind a rendering of the "Descent from the Cross." The face is marked by suffering, but is also gentle and suffused by a growing peacefulness as the pangs of death loosen their grip. David has surrounded Marat with a number of details borrowed from his subject's world,  including the knife and Charlotte Corday's petition, attempting to suggest through these objects both the victim's simplicity and grandeur, and the perfidy of the assassin.  The petition ("My great unhappiness gives me a right to your kindness"), the assignat Marat was preparing for some poor unfortunate ("you will give this assignat to that mother of five children whose husband died in the defense of his country"), the makeshift writing-table and the mended sheet are the means by which David discreetly bears witness to his admiration and indignation.

The face, the body, and the objects are suffused with a clear light, which is softer as it falls on the victim's features and harsher as it illuminates the assassin's petition. David leaves the rest of his model in shadow. In this sober and subtle interplay of elements can be seen, in perfect harmony with the drawing, the blend of compassion and outrage David felt at the sight of the victim.  The painting was presented to the  Coinvention on 15 November 1793.  It immediately the object of extravagant praise;  one critic claimed "the face expresses a supreme kindness and an exemplary revolutionary spirit carried to the point of sacrifice."  

After Robespierre's fall,  the painting was returned to David and was rescued from obscurity only after his death.  Misunderstood by the Romantics, who saw in it only a cold classicism, it was restored to a place of honor by Baudelaire, who wrote in 1846:  "The drama is here,  vivid in its pitiful horror.  This painting is David's masterpiece and one of the great curiosities of modern art because,  by a strange feat, it has nothing trivial or vile.  What is most surprising in this very unusual visual poem is that it was painted very quickly.  When one thinks of the beauty of the lines,  this quickness is bewildering.  This is food for the strong,  the triumph of spiritualism.  This painting is as cruel as nature but it has the fragrance of ideals.  Where is the ugliness that hallowed Death erased so quickly with the tip of his wing?  Now Marat can challenge Apollo.  He has been kissed by the loving lips of Death and he rests in the peace of his metamorphosis.  This work contains something both poignant and tender;  a soul is flying in the cold air of this room,  on these cold walls, aropund this cold funerary tub."

David's position was unchallenged as the painter of the Revolution,  and he sought in his three paintings of `martyrs of the Revolution',  to apply to these modern men the same universal tragedy to be found in his beloved antiquity.  Ultimately,  only the Death of Marat survived.  The Death of Lepeletier (of 1793) was destroyed in the Thermidorian reaction,  and The Death of Bara remained unfinished.  David himself was arrested during the Thermidorian reaction,  but was not among the hundreds who were condemned to death.  He was,  however,  jailed for more than a year,  during which time he painted his second self-portrait.

http://www.bc.edu/bc_org/avp/cas/his/CoreArt/art/neocl_dav_marat.html

The Oath of the Horatii

This painting occupies an extremely important place in the body of David's work and in the history of French painting.  It was commissioned by the Administrator of Royal Residences in 1784 and exhibited at the 1785 Salon under the title The Oath of the Horatii, between their Father's Hands.  The story was taken from Titus-Livy. We are in the period of the wars between Rome and Alba, in 669 B.C. It has been decided that the dispute between the two cities must be settled by an unusual form of combat to be fought by two groups of three champions each. The two groups are the three Horatii brothers and the three Curiatii brothers. The drama lay in the fact that one of the sisters of the Curiatii, Sabina, is married to one of the Horatii, while one of the sisters of the Horatii, Camilla, is betrothed to one of the Curiatii. Despite the ties between the two families, the Horatii's father exhorts his sons to fight the Curiatii and they obey, despite the lamentations of the women.

David succeeded in ennobling these passions and transforming these virtues into something sublime. Corneille and Poussin had already used this same subject and treated it as a sentimental and aristocratic game.  Unlike these,  David decided to treat the beginning, rather than the denouement of the action, seeing that initial moment as being charged with greater intensity and imbued with more grandeur. And, it was he who chose the idea of the oath (it is not mentioned in the historical accounts), transforming the event into a solemn act that bound the wills of different individuals in a single, creative gesture. He was not the first painter to do so, but certainly the first to do it in such a stirring manner.
The viewer's eye spontaneously grasps two superimposed orders-that of the figures and that of the decor.  The first is striking because it is organized into three different groups, each with a different purpose. To the appeal of the elder Horatius in the center, the reply on the left is the spontaneous vigor of the oath, upheld loudly and with a show of strength, while on the right it is a tearful anguish, movement turned in upon itself, compressed into emotion.  The distance between the figures accentuates this contrast. To the heroic determination of the men the canvas opposes the devastated grief of the women and the troubled innocence of the children.

The decor is reduced to a more abstract order, that of architectural space--massive columns, equally massive arches, opening out onto a majestic shadow.  The three archways loosely correspond to the three groups.  The contemplative atmosphere is softened by shades of green, brown, pink, and red, all very discreet. Instead of opening his painting out onto a landscape or an expanse of sky, David closes it off to the outside, bathes it in shadow. As a result, the light in this setting takes on a brick-toned reflection, which encircles his figures with a mysterious halo.

Through David's rigorous and efficient arrangement, the superior harmony of the colors, and the spiritual density of the figures, this sacrifice, transfigured by the oath, becomes the founding act of a new aesthetic and moral order.  He consciously intended it to be a proclamation of the new neoclassical style in which dramatic lighting, ideal forms, and gestural clarity are emphasized. Presenting a lofty moralistic (and by implication patriotic) theme, the work became the principal model for noble and heroic historical painting of the next two decades. It also launched David's personal  popularity and awarded him the right to take on his own students.

http://www.bc.edu/bc_org/avp/cas/his/CoreArt/art/neocl_dav_oath.html