Emulation Making Artists for Revolutionary France

"Crow's work, for all the question marks that it leaves, has the great merit of pursuing questions in a serious and sustained fashion. He does not write about a few canvases or a single painter in aesthetic isolation. He sets his sights very high, and if he fails to hit his target consistently, he nevertheless manages to force the reader to rethink a number of longstanding assumptions: that art is separate and autonomous, that artists work alone in the privacy of their thoughts, that style has nothing to do with politics or social life. Crow combines excellent formal and stylistic analysis of particular paintings with close attention to the psychological complexities and political and social contexts of the artist's 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. Thus, he brings the reader and the viewer into the picture in new and often surprising ways. His arguments intrigue, and even where they prove irritating, inconclusive or forced, they in turn prompt us to go look again. And look again we should, for the painting of the late eighteenth century reveals the ambiguities, highest hopes and all too human misconceptions about democracy.Crow, Thomas is the author of 'Emulation Making Artists for Revolutionary France', published 1997 under ISBN 9780300072747 and ISBN 0300072740.