An Artist in her Own Right

by Ann Marti Friedman

  A particularly unpopular reform desired by Charles X was to take away the right to vote from the merchant middle class. As a shop owner, Antoine’s brother-in-law Jacques Amalric was a member of this class. His and the Gros family’s disappointment with the monarchy, to which they would otherwise have been willing to be loyal, had been a topic of Sunday dinner discussion through the spring and early summer. He had signed his name to one of the petitions to the King and admired the members of the Chamber of Deputies who stood up to him.

  Antoine sympathized with Jacques, but Charles X had been appreciative of him. The King had attended the opening celebration for the Pantheon Dome; conferred the title of Baron on Gros as a reward; and invited him to the coronation at Reims. Antoine had received the commission to paint several gallery ceilings in the Louvre, which he fulfilled with scenes in a cold Neoclassical style of which David would have been proud. He did not want to lose such an important patron.

  Unrest mounted through a spring and summer of food shortages, unemployment, and unrest. Paris finally erupted for three days at the end of July. Eugène Delacroix, catching the sentiment of the moment, celebrated this second July revolution in his Liberty Leading the People.

  My experience of those days was different. I felt a virtual prisoner in our apartment, afraid to go outside, to open a window, even to look outside lest I fall victim to a stray bullet. I thought of my mother in similar circumstances in 1789 and realized just how terrifying a time it must have been for her.

  Antoine was wretched. Having been through so many political ups and downs over the years in France and Italy, and approaching the age of 60, he yearned for enduring stability. He was angry at Charles X for being so politically obtuse as to bring about the unrest.

  Jacques Amalric, who had been among the protestors at the Tuileries Palace, came to see us on the third evening.

  “We’ve won! The King has agreed to abdicate!” He picked me up and swung me around in his exuberance.

  I smiled at his enthusiasm. “Who will succeed him?”

  He shook his head. “It is not yet decided. The Chamber of Deputies – a chamber elected by all classes – will decide.”

  “Perhaps they will invite the King of Rome to rule as Napoleon II,” Antoine said, hope lighting his face, his hand touching his favorite talisman, the Légion d’honneur pinned to his lapel.

  Jacques shook his head again. “Even if they wished it, the rest of Europe would never allow another Bonaparte to come to power.”

  Antoine’s shoulders slumped.

  With that, Jacques bade us farewell and went home to break the good news to his family.

  In the end, the Duc d’Orléans, a member of a lesser branch of the Bourbons, was invited to ascend the throne. He took the name Louis-Philippe.

  Once again, Antoine presented himself at court, fully confident that the new monarch and his ministers would honor his talents and his long record of service. He was to be severely disappointed. The new arts administration scorned and ridiculed Antoine. For the first time in a quarter-century he was out of favor for official commissions. It left him adrift in a sea of self-doubt.

  The following year, an even heavier blow fell upon him – his mother’s death at the age of eighty-three. She had always been the great prop and constant in his life, his one unfailing source of support and consolation. She kept her strong will in all things until the end. Her mercifully brief last illness was too short to prepare her son for her death. He walked through the funeral Mass and burial in an uncomprehending state, mouthing the necessary things by rote, shaking the hands of the mourners with a weak grasp and blank eyes that saw nothing but his inner landscape of grief. It was only after we had returned from placing her in the family vault that he broke down in floods of tears, locking himself in her room and repulsing all my attempts to comfort him.

  Antoine had always been subject to bouts of melancholy. Girodet taught me how to tease him out of them: tell him they were part of his creative genius as an artist, according to the ancient philosophers. This would earn me a slight smile at first, then a more genuine one as he shifted his view to see his ailment in a positive light and no longer felt alone with it. But now, nothing that any of us could say could lift him out of his depression. Only little Cécile could bring a smile to his face and relax its habitual lines of disappointment. Once, on a day when he had not the energy to stir out of doors to visit her, I even went so far as to fetch the girl myself. On our return, I found he had shaved and dressed for the first time in days. He put on a bright face and animated voice so the little girl should not be frightened.

  Our life together continued to deteriorate. Any illusion I had that it would improve without his mother was soon dispelled. We had left that adjustment too late. I could not even run the household to suit him. Released from the old lady’s tyranny, our cook started to add strange flavors, experiment with new cuts of meat. I enjoyed the change, but Antoine whined and complained like the fussy old man he had become. I would often grimace with distaste for this aging stranger. All our married life, I had looked forward to having my husband to myself. Now that I had, I did not like him anymore. I felt cheated and angry and stubbornly refused to “correct” the household to his mother’s ways. It sounds petty now as I write. But at the time it gave me a feeling of power and control, a bit of revenge. Antoine, seeing his complaints did no good, started to eat dinner out with his students or his mistress more often.

  These students became his greatest source of support. He was much less dogmatic and dictatorial with them than David had been with him. Teaching provided both a sense of continuity and pride in leaving a legacy in the next generation. His love for his students and theirs for him helped him to keep going through the darkest days.

  Even so, it was difficult for Antoine to handle the scornful attitude of the arts administration towards him. Unlike his predecessors, Louis-Philippe allowed the memories of Napoleon and his army to resurface and be honored. Jaffa and Eylau and other official works of the Empire were brought out of storage and hung in the galleries of the Palais du Luxembourg. In the fifteen years since these works had last been seen, Antoine had tried to live down the contemporary history painter he had been and remake himself into the artist David had hoped he would be. The work that resulted, cold, stiff, and formal, was not suited to his talents.

  Once when I compared his current works unfavorably to Jaffa, he yelled at me, “I am sick of hearing about that painting! I saw the error of my old ways, and I’ve moved on since then! Why can’t you recognize it? Why can’t everyone else?” The last words came out almost a sob. He had done all this at tremendous cost, persevering in the face of the jeers of the critics and the public’s dislike.

  Now these pictures he so regretted were on display again, delighting the public. Jaffa still had the power to cause a sensation, even after nearly thirty years. I went to see it again for the pleasure of remembrance. While I was there Antoine – who had sworn he would not come to see it – entered with a group of his pupils who had evidently cajoled him into coming. He did not see me. For all his assertions of indifference or hostility to it, he looked at his old masterpiece with tears running down his cheeks, overwhelmed by the memories it brought forth. A voice called out, “It’s Maître Gros!” Even across the years, I recognized the mock-reverent tones of the model for the figure of the doctor. The crowd burst into applause, and Gros was visibly moved by the tribute.

  The government, finally taking notice of him, wanted him to return to painting such subjects. When Louis-Philippe decided to transform the Palace of Versailles into a public museum, his administration requested The Battle of Iéna for the new Galerie des Batailles. My husband’s refusal contained a reproof: “Having already done so many paintings of this kind, I feel the necessity of concerning myself with subjects more appropriate to the study of art.”

  After that the government wanted nothing more to do with him. Antoine was written off in the cruelest possible terms as nobody, p
assé. The odious De Cailleux, the new administrator of the arts, said disdainfully, “Gros is a dead man; he is no longer good for anything.” He was immediately scolded by Louis-Philippe for his lack of charity, but the words, once said, made their way to Antoine.

  Ironically, it was his loving students who repeated it to him. Although they did so out of indignation rather than a desire to wound him, the effect was the same, destroying his self-confidence. “Then I’m no longer good for anything?” Antoine would ask. “There’s nothing left to do but drown myself.” It sapped his confidence so much that for a time his creativity was paralyzed and he could not paint. Not even the kind words of pupils and friends could pull him out of his downward spiral.

  I had few words of sympathy I could readily summon, they were so long out of use between us, but I managed to say, “That man is a fool, Antoine! You must not believe him.”

  He looked pleased. “Thank you, my dear,” he said, but then lapsed into an even more mournful expression. “Even you pity me, it seems – I must be in a sorry state.” It was the sort of thing we said to each other all too often then. “I miss you, Maman,” he sighed.

  He rallied, however, and vowed to do another monumental painting, one that would show them all he was not merely a relic of the Napoleonic era but a living painter. The Salon of June 1835 would be the perfect opportunity. He determined to find a subject that would combine the best of the Neoclassical style and subject matter to which he had devoted his art with the heroic action and spirited horses that everyone so admired in his battle paintings. Each evening he read the classical authors, seeking an exemplary subject. Each morning he went to his studio to find his way, through sketching and drawing, to the idea that would best inspire his brush. After two weeks he returned excited, bearing a small pen sketch that he laid before me in triumph. The subject he had chosen was one of the labors of Hercules – the conquest of the flesh-eating horses of Diomedes and the feeding of that wicked king to his own animals.

  Antoine worked on Hercules and Diomedes more intensely than I had ever seen him, putting into it all he had learned and believed in. For three months it became his whole life, his hope and vindication. The assured success of this work would restore his reputation. It would make up for the frustration of those last fifteen years, his finally admitted disillusionment with David, and the lack of support from his own wife. “The only two who really understood me were Maman and Girodet,” he would cry – tears came to him more easily than ever. So much was riding on this painting – everything, everything. “It cannot fail, it must not!” He was almost hysterical in his frequent assertions. “Surely this heroic physical combat of horse and man resulting in the triumph of good over evil will have something to please everyone.”

  In a burst of confidence, he wrote to the Ministry of the Interior to request that it purchase the work and place it in an academy to serve as an example to the young. I had a shiver of apprehension. What if the response to the painting did not live up to his hopes? I was afraid for him but could not respond to him, help him. Too many years of being pushed to the side of his life, of having my own wishes, hopes, ambition discounted and neglected – I could only look on with contempt and dislike, and turn my back on him and his ranting. Our embedded habit of antagonism had left us with little to say to each other that was not steeped in bitterness.

  He finished the painting in time for submission to the Salon. I was surprised and touched when Antoine invited me to be the first to see it. He spoke to me tenderly for the first time in weeks as he ushered me proudly into the studio. Hercules and Diomedes stood on an immense easel in the middle of the room. I examined it attentively, then with growing dismay, desperately racking my brains to discover something, anything, to say about it. Its sheer awfulness left me speechless.

  The outlandishly sized figure of Hercules, bulging with muscles from head to extended foot, dominated the canvas. The absurdly smaller Diomedes struggled in his arms while the diabolical horses tore at his chest. His captor seemed neither pleased nor disgusted, triumphant nor sympathetic, but gazed to one side, not meeting the viewer’s eye, with as indifferent an air as if he were killing an insect by drowning it in a basin of water. I have known men to show more agitation waiting for their dinner. The supposedly moral hero demonstrating stoic fortitude clearly had not a thought in his well-proportioned head. The coloring was cold, the outlines firm, the overall effect appalling.

  I turned my gaze from the Herculean alter-ego on the canvas to the mere mortal so desperate for vindication in the eyes of everyone who mattered in the art world – all the while claiming that they did not matter, that he was only doing what was right. He had turned his gaze to the canvas, a look of shining pride on his face. The desperate expression I had seen so often of late was gone. He liked his dreadful creation, saw nothing wrong with it, and expected me to do the same. I saw him clearly for the first time in years as though he were something I might want to paint – the small stature, trim figure, the well-fitting clothes and immaculately tied cravat, the hair curling gently onto his collar, and above all the fine brown eyes, large, warm, easily given to tears. Would I set him in his studio, in this imagined painting of mine? No, I thought, I would put him in the Dome of the Panthéon, painting what would seem like a vast area until one noticed the immensity of the space around him. A modern Sisyphus undaunted by the task before him and at the same time condemned by it. Or a modern knight tilting at a dragon, armed only with his painter’s brush. It was so ridiculous a fancy I wanted to laugh – or cry, I wasn’t sure which.

  The contempt I had so long felt for him cracked, then shattered. Deluded, ridiculous, pathetic as he might have been, staring proudly at that disaster of a painting, he was also more human, more vulnerable, than he had let himself be seen for many years. I had looked for the chinks in his armor in our warring days, but having found them now, I felt perversely as though I had been handed a gift of trust to cherish him. I felt overwhelmed, humbled and shaken, cracked out of the cold shell of bitterness that had imprisoned me for so long. Tears came to my eyes.

  “Well?” Antoine demanded, turning his gaze back to me.

  “I think you’re splendid,” I said warmly, and darted forward to kiss his cheek. He recoiled, startled, but recovered himself and looked not unpleased. He accepted the kiss then, and bestowed one of his own.

  “Not me, you goose, the painting. What do you think of Hercules?”

  At last he had turned to me, not to his mother, for validation – but as an artist I could not give it to him, however much I wanted to as a wife. Frantically, taking too long about it, I tried to marshal words while he looked at me in happy expectation. When I could finally say something, it sounded hollow and false. The old lines of disappointment replaced his happy expression of pride in his work. He shrugged with an eloquence that implied he had realistically expected nothing better from me. Silently he led me out of the studio to the street, where he hailed a fiacre and sent me home by myself.

  When the painting was accepted for the Salon, he was in a fever of anticipation to see where it would be placed and how well it would be received. Once I came in upon him practicing a rebuttal speech to those – “even my dear wife” – who had written him off as dead or at least good for nothing further. He had not seen me. I retreated quietly and closed the door behind me. His life had narrowed its focus to waiting for his vindication.

  But for all my belief in the futility of his hopes, at least he had them. I had nothing to hope for, no fame, no recognition; my brief Salon career was long over; my marriage long incapable of repair; my one true love long dead and buried – what was there to look forward to? God help me, I envied Antoine his optimism, however unlikely it might have been! I never saw that so clearly before now. He was miserable, he was tottering on the edge of a precipice mentally and physically, but I envied him then.

  Hercules and Diomedes was a dismal failure at the Salon. It was hung so high, catching the glare from the windows, that visi
tors could barely see it. The critics were even more vituperative than before. Antoine plunged from the heights of optimism to the depths of despair.

  The night of 25 June 1835, four months after the opening of the Salon, was warm and oppressive. After our usual silent dinner, Antoine dressed with care and went down to the street. The sound of his footsteps grew faint as he walked away. I never saw him again.

  It was too hot to sleep. I lay awake all night waiting for him to come home. I no longer cared very much about his sleeping in another woman’s bed, but his coming home at night was part of my daily routine. I grew uneasy. In retrospect it would be easy to claim I had a premonition, but at the time I was more concerned that he had been attacked and robbed. I put on the bracelet he had given me in Brussels, turning it round and round my wrist as I prayed for his safe return.

  Finally, a Commissaire of Police came at daybreak. Antoine’s body had been found floating in the Seine outside the Paris suburb of Meudon. His neatly folded coat and hat were on the riverbank, with his calling card placed in the hat. It gave every sign of being a deliberate act; there was no suspicion of foul play.

  As I sat absorbing the news, my mind and heart were a jumble of thoughts and emotions. Sorrow for Antoine – amazement that he had finally found the courage to commit the act – worry that the shame of it should tarnish his memory – dread that his friends and pupils, who had never liked me very much to begin with, would say I had played a part in driving him to this extreme – anger at De Cailleux and the others who had never appreciated his true worth as an artist – and a belated stab of guilt that I had, at times, been among them. I put that last thought away. Confirmation of the policeman’s diagnosis of suicide must be avoided at all costs. I marshaled my thoughts and spoke calmly and deliberately.