Elizabeth Mansfield,
The Perfect Foil: François-André Vincent and the Revolution in French Painting.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012.
320 pp.; 74 b&w photos, 24 color plates; index.
$35.00 (paper)
$105.00 (cloth)
ISBN 978-0-8166-7581-4 (paper)
ISBN 978-0-8166-7580-7 (cloth)

Over the last half-century Jacques-Louis David (1748–1825) has become the star of the history of art during the French Revolution, in no small part because of the combination of painting, personality, and politics that lend his life and work drama and historical weight. And while other artists of the so-called d’Angiviller generation of the 1770s and 1780s—many of whom were, like David, students of Joseph-Marie Vien (1716–1809)—have been given their due in French studies, François-André Vincent (1746–1816) had, until now, yet to be treated on his own terms.[1] Vincent is by no means a completely unknown name in the annals of eighteenth-century French painting; however, his appearance in that history is usually framed in comparison to the work of David. Take, for example, the appearance of Vincent’s Belisarius Reduced to Poverty (1776, Musée Fabre) in Michael Fried’s Absorption and Theatricality and Thomas Crow’s Painting and Public Life. Both authors pass through Vincent’s work en route to highlighting the singularity of David’s version, Belisarius Receiving Alms (1781, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lille). Fried goes as far as to claim David’s work is “by far the most impressive depiction of the Belisarius story in late eighteenth-century art.”[2] Vincent’s is the earlier of the two paintings, but David’s is considered the final word on the subject.

Elizabeth Mansfield’s The Perfect Foil: François-André Vincent and the Revolution in French Painting seeks to examine this role that Vincent has been assigned in the history of eighteenth-century painting, turning a critical eye to the narrative that put him in David’s shadow in the first place. Vincent’s work and career is certainly worthy of extended scholarly attention, but Mansfield is equally drawn to Vincent precisely because he is consistently construed as David’s foil, “always ready to step on stage as David’s presumptive rival” (ix). The book, Mansfield explains quite clearly in the preface, strives to be more than an exploration of an understudied artist’s life and career; it is both “history and historiography” (x). 

With such a goal in mind, The Perfect Foil begins not with Vincent’s career, but rather the origins of the David-Vincent rivalry and its significance. A close look at the Salon criticism shows that Vincent and David were not treated as direct rivals; within the academic tradition of emulation and competition, rivalry was diffused among all the young artists who were working to revitalize French history painting. It was not until the nineteenth century that the two men would be pitted against one another. Pierre Chaussard was the first to do so in his review of the Salon of 1806, Le Pausanias Français. Importantly, the rivalry was constructed largely in both ideological and aesthetic terms. Chaussard preferred Vincent in part because of the artist’s politics during the French Revolution and his “refus[al] to permit reprisals against even his cruelest enemies” (3). With the excesses of the Revolution still fresh in Chaussard’s memories, David was cast in the Le Pausanias Français as Vincent’s opposite, as a vengeful antagonist. These generalized constructions along ideological lines continued in the twentieth century, although Chaussard’s preference for the “nice guy” was lost. Over time, formalist approaches and the emphasis on connoisseurship construed David’s neoclassicism as superior to Vincent’s diverse stylistic vocabulary. With the subsequent turn to social art history and the interest in the intersection of art and politics in the second half of the century, David emerged as the artist-hero, his radical republicanism triumphing over what became Vincent’s (perceived) conservative politics.

If David was so aesthetically and politically superior—or, at least more interesting—then why mention Vincent at all? In short, Mansfield argues, art history needs Vincent in order to construct David’s artistic greatness. Rivalry contributes to the constructions of the artist-hero and genius. It sets up the conflicts and obstacles that must be overcome in order to propel an artist to greatness. Within this trope of rivalry is a certain type, the foil, who “exemplifies conventional success, fulfilling perfectly existing aesthetic expectations” (8). Mansfield presents the Vincent-David rivalry as an excellent case study through which to investigate the genius-foil narrative that the author describes as having been “naturalized” by art historical discourse.

Despite the artistic rivalry promoted by the historiography, Mansfield asserts that a close reading of the historical record suggests a different story: “it was in the realm of cultural policy and arts institutions that Vincent became a literal foil to David’s ambitions” (20). By shifting the attention from an invented aesthetic rivalry to the social and political conflict between the two artists, Mansfield aims to provide a new view into eighteenth-century art and culture, exposing a world more complex than a “Salon filled with works by Davidians” (21). To do so, Mansfield uses select works in Vincent’s oeuvre to highlight several themes: the significance of community and emotional bonds, religion, and the politics of artistic identity. All serve to enrich our understanding of the lives of artists during the Revolutionary period. 

After this extended historiography, the book proceeds chronologically. Following Chaussard, Mansfield begins with Vincent’s religion. Born in 1746 to miniature painter from Geneva, Vincent was a Protestant. While modern scholarship tends to ignore religion in the context of eighteenth-century French painting, there is a significant focus throughout the book on the impact of the political obstacles that Protestants faced and the growing call for tolerance during the Enlightenment. The first chapter addresses how Vincent’s family’s religion directly influenced his social network by leading his family to immigrate to a specific neighborhood in Paris. His family’s relationship with neighbors on the Rue Neuve des Petits Champs played a pivotal role in introducing Vincent to members of his life-long social and professional network. Fellow immigrant Protestant and portraitist Alexander Roslin (1718–1793), for example, introduced Vincent to his teacher Vien, and it was in Vien’s studio that he would form lifelong friendships with fellow students like Joseph-Benoît Suvée (1743–1807). Another important relationship to come out of this neighborhood was his friendship with his neighbor’s daughter, Adélaïde Labille-Guiard (1749–1803), who became his student and eventually his wife. Mansfield pays special attention to the effects these relationships had on Vincent’s artistic production, a second theme that runs throughout the text. Suvée’s citation of Vincent’s President Molé Seized by the Mob (1779, National Assembly, Paris) in his representation of the murder of a Huguenot hero in The Death of Coligny (1787, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Dijon) suggests Suvée’s admiration and support for his Protestant friend. Such serious consideration of the role of religion adds a new layer of interpretation to these works that moves beyond traditional discussions of the use of antique sources and the resurgence of subjects based on French history in late eighteenth-century painting.

Chapter three treats the completion of Vincent’s training at the French Academy in Rome. The first part of the chapter examines Vincent’s winning the coveted Prix de Rome. His prize-winning entry, Germanicus Quelling a Sedition (1768, École Nationale Supérieur des Beaux-Arts, Paris), is discussed at length as a textbook product of academic artistic education in the last half of the eighteenth century. Mansfield uses Germanicus to explore the twofold effect of Vien’s neoclassical influence as well as older traditional academic influences of Charles Le Brun and Nicolas Poussin. Turning to Vincent’s Roman experience, Mansfield again focuses on the role of personal interactions to bring to light the challenges and pleasures of his life as a pensioner, some of which were particular to a Protestant in Rome. Vincent’s religion was kept a secret before his departure; had it been known, he likely would have been declared ineligible for the prize, which was only open to “Frenchmen, Catholics” and, furthermore, Protestantism was forbidden and punishable by imprisonment in Rome. Mansfield balances the official matters found in the correspondence between the surintendants de bâtiments (Buildings Directors) and the Director of the French Academy in Rome Charles Natoire (1700–77), which provides evidence for the ultra-devout Natoire’s antagonism toward the young artist, with visual evidence of less formalized interactions such as Vincent’s marvelous caricatures of his fellow pensioners. In Rome Vincent was introduced to a host of new artistic influences and professional contacts, including close contact with his fellow pensioners, as well as Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1732–1806), who was traveling through Italy with the collector Jacques-Onésyme Bergeret de Grandcourt. Mansfield’s analysis of the Vincent’s work for Bergeret de Grandcourt, including the collector’s portrait (1774, Musée des Beaux-Arts et d’Archaeologie, Besançon) and its unusual pendant of his dog, Diane (1774, Musée des Beaux-Arts et d’Archaeologie, Besançon), bring attention to the artist’s range in style and genre, introducing another important argumentative thread that will carry through the rest of the book. The intertwining themes of diverse formal expression and personal relationships are brought together in Vincent’s often overlooked caravaggesque Portrait of Three Men (1774, Musée du Louvre, Paris) which the artist painted en route from Rome to Paris. An ambitious and enigmatic triple portrait, the work is simultaneously freundschaftbilde (friendship portrait) and coming-of-age portrait, which Mansfield argues, “fuses the lessons of aesthetic emulation with his concerns about his changing identity” (73).

Mansfield examines Vincent’s submissions to the Salons of 1777 and 1779 in chapter four, focusing primarily on his two small-scale history paintings Belisarius Reduced to Poverty (1776, Musée Fabre, Montpellier) and Alcibades Receiving the Lessons of Socrates (1777, Musée Fabre, Montpellier), displayed in 1777, and the state-commissioned President Molé Seized by the Mob (National Assembly, Paris), shown in 1779. She re-emphasizes Belisarius’s place in the politics of eighteenth-century painting; the work and its pendant Alcibades demonstrated that Vincent was prepared and capable of producing the type of works that the Comte d’Angiviller, Louis XVI’s surintendant de bâtiments, was seeking. Importantly, Mansfield highlights that it was the arguments made for religious tolerance in Jean-François Marmontel’s 1767 novel, Belisarius, which earned the censure of theologians at the Sorbonne. Furthermore, by choosing a subject that is not a scene from the novel, but that would be repeated in subsequent versions—that of a poverty-stricken Belisarius receiving alms—Vincent gave the painting an ambiguity that made it “a vehicle for the broad contemplation of social issues” (85). It encouraged viewers to contemplate the various themes of Marmontel’s novel without forcing a specific reading. By reintroducing the religious themes of the subject, Mansfield moves the interpretation of the artwork well beyond its usual role as an example of the popularity of the subject, a brief stop on the way to David’s 1781 Belisarius Receiving Alms (Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lille). It repositions the painting within Vincent’s personal interests as well as his professional ambitions. The similar composition of Belisarius’s pendant, Alcibades Receiving the Lessons of Socrates, highlights the philosophical similarities between Socrates’s and Belisarius’s call for tolerance, encouraging viewers to compare the two men. Mansfield sees Vincent again highlighting religious tolerance in President Molé Seized by the Mob by setting the scene at a prominent crossroad in Paris where heretics had been burned. A work meant to highlight the virtuous example of Mole’s calmness in the face of a Parisian mob also serves to reference contemporary calls for religious tolerance being made by Jansenist parliamentarians in the 1770s and 1780s.

By the end of chapter four, the reader may have forgotten that this is a book that seeks to examine the concept of rivalry, for it is not until chapter five, “Painting Women of Virtue and Women of virtu,” that we begin to see more overt examples of the two artists’ opposition. The chapter addresses Vincent’s second set of paintings completed for d’Angiviller’s travaux d’encouragement, The Battle between the Romans and the Sabines Interrupted by the Sabine Women (1781, Museum of Fine Arts, Angers) and Arria and Paetus (1784; St. Louis Art Museum; 1785, Musée Picardie, Amiens). Mansfield argues that Vincent’s representation of subjects with women protagonists—the first assigned by d’Angiviller, the second chosen by the artist himself—signals his concern with the theme of feminine virtue. Vincent’s interest in the relationship between self-sacrifice and devotion to family draws obvious comparison to David’s work. But whereas paintings like David’s Oath of the Horatii (1785, Musée du Louvre, Paris) place women off to the side in opposition to masculine patriotism and self-sacrifice, Arria sacrifices herself to inspire her husband to do the right thing. For Mansfield, Vincent’s depictions of virtuous women show that female public virtue were viable subjects for history painting.

Vincent’s two versions of Arria and Paetus also challenged the idea that women’s public honor and private virtue were separate or conflicting ideals. Vincent’s appreciation for such a theme may have been drawn from his own interactions with Adélaïde Labille-Guiard, whose private virtue was called into question by her Salon participation; the second half of this chapter explores his relationship with Labille-Guiard more closely. There has been much scholarly interest women painters in the past few decades, and Labille-Guiard and her own ‘rival,’ Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun (1755–1842) have been the subject of extensive monographic studies.[3] Mansfield’s commitment to incorporating Labille-Guiard into Vincent’s story as more than a student is especially notable; she sees an active artistic dialogue between the two artists. Labille-Guiard’s visual exchanges with Vincent on the motif of mother and children seen in the Sabines and Vincent’s portraits are treated as a form of visual response much like the thematic and visual similarities of the artist’s visual exchanges with Suvée described in chapter two. Vincent’s Zeuxis Selecting Models from the Most Beautiful Women of Croton (1789, Musée du Louvre, Paris) is not only a meditation on the role of the artist, but also a disguised promotional self-portrait produced during a period of professional stagnation, an idea inspired by Labille-Guiard’s large-scale Self-Portrait with Two Students (1785, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), which was shown at the Salon of 1785 and helped her to attract commissions from the aunts of Louis XVI. Labille-Guiard is considered as an equal and active influence on Vincent’s creative process.

Chapter six, “The Revolution in French Art” and chapter seven, “Down with the Tyrant,” address Vincent’s role in the French Revolution. As Mansfield points out later, in the most often told version of painting during the Revolution, “Vincent comes off as the conservative academician who retreats from history painting in the face of David’s overawing genius; as the man whose fragile health leads him to excuse himself from public life; as the artiste non-engagé who waits out the Revolution on the sidelines, limiting his work to the safety of portraiture” (203). At the core of these two chapters is an important question: how do we deal with Vincent’s tempered attitude towards the Revolution? These chapters directly engage Vincent’s relationship with David, and Mansfield uses Vincent’s involvement with revolutionary politics to “offer[s] a window into the complexity of liberal politics and their bearing on art and arts institutions” (131). She finds evidence for Vincent’s early enthusiasm for the Revolution in his preliminary study for The Taking of the Bastille (1789, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Dijon), while also demonstrating that other works, such as Democritus among the Abderites (ca. 1790–91, Los Angeles Country Museum of Art), which depicts the philosopher contemplating a severed head, suggest that Vincent was not completely at ease with revolutionary fervor. Coming back to the importance of Vincent’s stylistic versatility, she argues that Democritus harkens back to the light-hearted language of rococo to disguise the artist’s satirical commentary on the growing mob mentality of the 1791. Mansfield’s serious consideration of Vincent’s measured tone suggests a bigger role for “official” art in criticism of the Jacobin regime. Democritus made it to the Salon’s walls, but Vincent’s visual criticisms often stalled when they questioned Jacobin politics too overtly. One such example, a painting based on the story of the Horatii, Old Horatius Exhorting Sabine to Honor Her Husband (1791, Private Collection), focused on a less clearly virtuous moment than David’s Oath of the Horatii: that of Sabine, the Curatii sister begging to be killed in place of her husband, who has just killed his sister, Camille. In opposition to David’s painting, Vincent’s version demonstrates that law is in conflict with (domestic) honor, again through the use of a female protagonist. The work understandably never proceeded further than preparatory drawings due to the political clime, but through this work and others, Mansfield presents Vincent as an engaged, critical participant in the Revolution.

Vincent’s involvement with the National Museum Commission, which was tasked with establishing a museum at the Louvre, directly pitted the artist’s moderate views against David’s Jacobin policies. As the Jacobins rose to power, the Commission was increasingly criticized for the perceived moderate Girondist sympathies of its members. Despite Vincent’s fervent defense of the Commission, he was forced to resign, but not before being denounced by David for lacking patriotic fervor. Soon after, Vincent’s sister was guillotined, and his life-long friend Suvée was imprisoned. Mansfield describes these events as the political backdrop to the creation of William Tell Overturning the Barque of Gesler (1795, Musée des Augustins, Toulouse) in chapter seven. The painting, which was commissioned in 1791 but not completed until after the fall of Maximilien Robespierre in 1794, reveals Vincent’s emotional and psychic state after the events of the Terror. The figure of William Tell, we learn, was an especially powerful and malleable revolutionary symbol. Vincent chose none of the typical stories associated with Tell that may have resonated with earlier events of the Revolution, but instead depicted the lesser known overturning of the boat of the tyrannical governor Gesler. The subject resonates with the recent fall of France’s own tyrant Robespierre, but the violence is visualized through the expressive Baroque style and tensed bodies. Vincent’s decision to completely eschew classicism for a visual language better equipped for the expression of emotionalism and theatricality is read as an ideological reaction against stoic coolness of Neoclassicism, the visual language of the Davidian cultural program. Mansfield’s suggestion is supported by her attention to Vincent’s earlier experiments with Baroque forms of visual expression. Here, the artist’s stylistic range is poignantly employed as commentary on the Revolution; William Tell is part of the Romantic aesthetic language that arrived in France as an ideological reaction to the Revolution.

After 1795, Vincent’s artistic output was limited by failing health, financial problems, and his continued work for the Institut de France. Thus, the final chapter addresses largely uncompleted works, including Vincent’s only Napoleonic commission, the unfinished Battle of the Pyramids (undated, location unknown), and a series of genre portraits commissioned by the cloth manufacturer and merchant François-Bernard Boyer Fonfrède, brother of the executed deputy; only two of these were completed (Duty and Happiness, 1801, Musée National du Chtâteau et des Trianons, Versailles, and The Plowing Lesson, 1798, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Bordeaux). The unfinished works serve to demonstrate Vincent’s continued creativity and public engagement Post-Thermidor. By contextualizing the Boyer-Fonfrède series in Rousseauian discourses on education, Mansfield sees the combination of portraiture, history, and genre scenes demonstrated in the series as a new pictorial mode well suited to the demands of politics and patrons during the Directory period (1795–99). The series feeds into a contemporary taste for portraiture and participates in public discourse around social policy and education. It could be argued that combining genre and portraiture was a more established tradition during the ancien régime than Mansfield suggests, however oriented towards public engagement this particular hybridization of Vincent’s series may have been.[4] Mansfield balances Vincent’s continued commitment to public life during the Directory with close attention to more private forms of expressions, coming back once again to the role of his Protestant beliefs. She uses his preparatory sketches for a painting on the subject of Mucius Scaevola (1798–99, Albertina, Vienna) to explore the connection between the Roman hero’s refusal to be terrorized and the Protestant martyr Thomas Crammer’s persecution, arguing that the work is a private expression of Vincent’s feelings of heroism about his own personal trials during the Terror.

The Battle of the Pyramids, Vincent’s last major work, concludes the book and also serves to frame Mansfield’s final thoughts on Vincent’s career and its historiography. Vincent’s most ambitious painting never moved beyond a now lost ébauche, or full-size monochrome underdrawing (sketch), although Mansfield uses extant preparatory drawings, such as the Louvre’s mixed-media study from 1800, and contemporary descriptions to get a sense of the work’s intended effect. The ébauche was shown at the Salon of 1806, and Chaussard spoke highly of it in Le Pausanias Français, allowing Mansfield, in a sense, to come full circle. Chaussard’s ambivalence to the Napoleonic regime is revealed in his politically-driven criticisms of David which cast the first painter to the emperor as an opportunist. He turns to Vincent for an example of moral virtue. It is in The Battle of the Pyramids, Mansfield argues, that Vincent’s commitment to the ideals of 1789 and ambivalence about the rise of Napoleon are best seen. Compared with other representations of the battle, Vincent’s composition does not present the viewer with the heroic Bonaparte seen in Antoine-Jean Gros’s Bonaparte Haranguing the Army before the Battle of the Pyramids, July 21, 1798 (1810, Musée National du Château et des Trianons, Versailles) or the traditional panorama found in Philippe-Auguste Hennequin’s Battle of the Pyramids (1806, Musée National du Château et des Trianons, Versailles). Rather, the scene is composed from the perspective of the losing side—that of the mamelukes who bravely but unsuccessfully repelled Napoleon’s army. Envisioning French viewers in front of the now lost full-scale drawing, which depicted the fighting men nude, Mansfield sees viewers as “imagin[ing] themselves in any number of reassuring roles,” an interpretation that indirectly, but tantalizingly, suggests why Vincent was unable to complete the painting. If Vincent had filled in the men’s identifying features and clothing, “viewers would have confronted the possibility that the mamelukes rather than the French soldiers might be more appealing surrogates for themselves” (209).

The ambiguity demonstrated in the unfinished The Battle of the Pyramids, Mansfield concludes, is precisely what makes Vincent so interesting, and, most importantly, is but one final example of how Vincent “recognized the contingency not only of his own circumstances but also of social forces themselves” (213). While the understanding of contingency allowed him to adjust his expectations during the ancien régime, being unable to commit to any one political or aesthetic dogma made Vincent out of place in the partisan politics of the French Revolution. The artist, she argues, insisted on “calibrating formal expression with thematic demands” (215), which resulted in an admirable amount of aesthetic experimentation. However, it is exactly this self-awareness, ambivalence, and adaptability which set him up as David’s foil and caused his critics to “perceiv[e] his stylistic promiscuity, his ideological restraint, and his incomplete projects as symptoms of a lack of aesthetic or personal resolve” (216).

The Perfect Foil shines most when Mansfield challenges Vincent’s perceived “weaknesses,” showing that they were actually some of his greatest strengths. Her argument is greatly helped by the book’s carefully constructed argument. After the first chapter’s clear explanation of the reasons behind her historiographic intervention, her careful and extended attention to the importance of religion and his personal social network—two often overlooked aspects of an artist’s biography—give the reader a fuller picture of the artist, broadening our understanding of artistic life during the period. When the moment comes for Vincent and David to be seen opposing each other in the political arena of the Revolution, the reader is so well convinced of Vincent’s own self-sufficiency that the tables can be reversed. “Stylistic promiscuity” can be seen as thoughtful criticism of the fast-changing politics that surrounded him thanks to Mansfield’s careful consideration of Vincent’s previous stylistic experimentations. We can see David, as Chaussard did, as Vincent’s foil, and move beyond the David-driven narrative of painting during the French Revolution

After existing in David’s shadow for so long, it seems as though the Vincent is finally having his moment. During 2013, there will be a large monographic exhibition of the artist's work, as well as the publication of the long awaited catalogue raisonné of the artist’s work by Jean-Pierre Cuzin.[5] While both of these events will undoubtedly provide access to works long squirreled away in private collections and introduce us to unknown examples of the artist’s work, The Perfect Foil provides ample reasons for why Vincent is worthy of such attention.

Jessica L. Fripp
Post-Doctoral Fellow, Parsons The New School for Design
frippj[at]newschool.edu