Abstract
As the author of this important book consistently underlines, discussions of Vincent exemplify ‘the tendency for contemporary historians to engage the artist largely or exclusively in comparative terms with David’ (p. 222, n. 18). And, even in that particular context, he is frequently relegated to a footnote. In Warren Roberts’s fine Jacques-Louis David, Revolutionary Artist (see JES 23 (1991): 85), he gets a mention merely as a fellow-member of the Institut de France, elected alongside David in 1795. For Norman Bryson, within his once-radical Tradition and Desire, also published in the late 1980s, he is a tiny part of what is called ‘David and the Problem of Inheritance’. That neither Roberts nor Bryson are indexed here is less a bibliographical oversight than testimony to the immense amount of research devoted to the period during the last 25 years. Mansfield has mastered that art-historical scholarship in illuminating ways, extended beyond the kind of rivalry explored, most notably, by Thomas Crow’s Emulation: Making Artists for Revolutionary France (1995). She stresses the particularities of Vincent’s personal and ideological positioning, grounded in the urban and cultural geography of the rue Neuve des Petits Champs. In this location, the painter came into decisive contact with influences that would shape his representations of women as catalysts for social progress as well as aesthetic achievement. Vincent’s adherence to Protestantism seems to have been only one factor in his acute recognition of contingency, embracing ambiguity in his visual response to post-Revolutionary conditions, an orientation likened to what Richard Rorty (in relation to Romantic poetry) has termed that of the ‘liberal ironist’: ‘Alternately earnest, satirical, stoic and theatrical, his Revolutionary artworks document his refusal to adhere to a single formula for representing political or aesthetic ideas’ (p. 213). This overlaid set of perspectives leaves the viewer unsure whether the painter’s tendency towards self-mockery signals political indecisiveness or, at this acutely uncertain historical moment, the foresight to keep his options open. In practice, his William Tell Overturning the Barque of Gesler (1795) and Battle of the Pyramids (c. 1800), to cite examples subject to chapter-length scrutiny, are not amenable to diagnosis of ‘meaning’ other than in the contradictions of narrative content and spatial configuration. From a contemporary fund of legitimate subjects, consecrated for posterity by the consummate renderings of David himself, Vincent’s less heroically declarative versions are too easily forgotten in the margins of the canon. Mansfield declares that it is not her intention to rehabilitate his status, but rather to highlight, in the period between 1768 and 1807, what distinguishes Vincent’s negotiation of the fraught circumstances of his time. In the process, however, he emerges from David’s shadow in his own right. The wonderful illustrations in her book, a significant number of them in colour, confirm his professional brilliance across generic categories. Next time one visits the Musée Fabre, in Montpellier, one will pause before heading for the famous Courbets. Vincent’s Belisarius Reduced to Poverty (1776) and Socrates (1777) there are no mere spectral reflection of David’s genius. Vincent’s own Sabine Women (1781) merits a visit to Angers. His portraits, many of them ‘recovered’ by Mansfield in provincial museums from Saint-Omer to Besançon, are beautifully done by any standard. Symptomatically, his Self-Portrait of 1774 is to be found in a place honouring another painter, the Musée Fragonard in Grasse. What also remains distinct, as Mansfield persuasively argues, is the challenge Vincent poses to interpretation. While she invokes, to telling effect, analogies with Romanticism, one is left to speculate that Flaubert would have appreciated this painter rather more than he did Jacques-Louis David.