A Reintroduction to the Introspective Prud’hon

Delacroix called him a “ravishing genius.” Baudelaire wrote that he was “delightful.” Gericault championed him. Napoleon awarded him the French Legion of Honor. But such is the fickleness of art historical memory that now Pierre-Paul Prud’hon (1758-1823) requires the introduction of a total stranger.

A retrospective exhibition currently at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (organized by the Met and France’s Reunion des Musees Nationaux) serves as remedial education--serious, purposeful, keyed to instruction more than revelation. The show, consisting of 56 paintings and more than 100 works on paper, moves responsibly through Prud’hon’s career, covering all of the bases--portraiture, book illustration, interior decoration, allegorical painting, furniture design, drawing--with deadpan uniformity. Because the dully conventional gets as much attention as the sensually ravishing, the show ends up feeling flabby. If first impressions of Prud’hon are at stake here, a more taut curatorial approach would have served better.

Prud’hon was a contemporary of Jacques-Louis David, a fellow Jacobin and visual propagandist for the cause of the French Revolution. Though David’s reputation has eclipsed Prud’hon’s over time, in their day both were prominent and comparably favored with prestigious commissions. Prud’hon won a prize early in his studies that enabled him to spend four impressionable years in Italy, copying from antiquities and absorbing the seasoned influence of Leonardo as well as that of his own contemporary, the Roman sculptor Antonio Canova. Gradually, Prud’hon developed his own peculiar brand of Neoclassicism that looked back to the Rococo in its decorative sentimentality but also hinted at the emerging Romantic tendency toward intense emotion, fire in the flesh.

*

Prud’hon’s allegorical paintings, featuring personified virtues, seasons and fates in shallow-staged narrative tableaux, typify the popular salon subjects of the day, while demonstrating the artist’s own range in style from the saccharine (“The Union of Love and Friendship” [1793]) to the tempestuous and erotic (“Psyche Carried Off by the Zephyrs” [1808]). They moralize, on occasion, and also claim association at times with the evolving, contemporaneous political narrative, as in the dramatically overwrought “Justice and Divine Vengeance Pursuing Crime,” which Prud’hon painted for the criminal court of the Palais de Justice in Paris under Napoleon’s watch.

In contrast to the bolder, brighter, more muscular civic propaganda painted by David and his circle, Prud’hon, at his best, leaned toward the introspective, even when fulfilling imperial commissions. The most outstanding example of this unconventional tendency is the 1805-09 portrait of Empress Josephine, seated on a mossy ledge in a shimmering white gown with red wrap. Her alabaster skin gleams within the shadowy wooded setting, and her gaze is absent, inward, surmised to be melancholic in anticipation of her impending divorce.

Prud’hon won ample commissions during Napoleon’s reign, for imperial household furniture, revolutionary allegories, and even for the decorations for the emperor’s 1810 wedding to Josephine’s successor, Marie-Louise, and for the design of their baby’s crib. He fulfilled his assignments with expected flair, pomp and spectacle, but it was his art’s “interiority,” as scholar John Elderfield has termed it, that distinguished Prud’hon from his peers, the introspective quality that permeates the Empress Josephine’s portrait and especially his later drawings.

It was unusual for a mature artist like Prud’hon, with an established career, to devote so much energy to autonomous studies of nudes, drawings that were not preparatory to larger compositions. Entirely self-generated and free from narrative function, the figure drawings--unfortunately, only 16 are included in the show--have an unmediated vitality that is often lacking in Prud’hon’s more conventional work. Drawn in black and white chalk on blue paper, using poses that borrow from antique statuary, the studies breathe, the figures comport themselves with balletic grace and strength, and often suggest a quiet, meditative integrity.

Delacroix recounted that in his last years Prud’hon could be found every evening in the studio of one of his students, drawing, as if he were a student himself. Displayed here amid so much of the artist’s bread-and-butter work, the drawings feel especially fresh and immediate, radiating with both intellect and sensuality.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Fifth Avenue at 82nd Street, New York, (212) 879-5500, through June 7.