Emulation

This book tells the story of five painters at the center of events in Revolutionary France: Jacques-Louis David and his first cohort of precocious pupils, including the meteoric Jean-Germain Drouais and the astonishingly gifted but deeply troubled Anne-Louis Girodet. Written by a major art historian, it interprets in a new and original way the relationships between these men and the paintings they created. This new edition includes a revised introduction and incorporates the fruit of recent new research.
“Crow combines excellent formal and stylistic analysis of particular paintings with close attention to the psychological complexities and political and social contexts of the artists’ lives. He delves deeply into David’s and his students’ thematic choices, compositional strategies and personal relations in order to make his overarching political and aesthetic arguments
Thomas Crow is director of the Getty Research Institute. He is also the author of Painters and Public Life in Eighteenth-Century Paris and Modern Art in the Common Culture, both published by Yale University Press.