Restoration: The Fall of Napoleon in the Course of European Art, 1812-1820
Thomas Crow
Series: The A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts (Book 62)
Hardcover: 208 pages
Publisher: Princeton University Press (November 13, 2018)
ISBN-13: 9780691181646

How social upheavals after the collapse of the French Empire shaped the lives and work of artists in early nineteenth-century Europe

As the French Empire collapsed between 1812 and 1815, artists throughout Europe were left uncertain and adrift. The final abdication of Emperor Napoleon, clearing the way for a restored monarchy, profoundly unsettled prevailing national, religious, and social boundaries. In Restoration, Thomas Crow combines a sweeping view of European art centers―Rome, Paris, London, Madrid, Brussels, and Vienna―with a close-up look at pivotal and significant artists, including Antonio Canova, Jacques-Louis David, Théodore Géricault, Francisco Goya, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Thomas Lawrence, and forgotten but meteoric painters François-Joseph Navez and Antoine Jean-Baptiste Thomas. Whether directly or indirectly, all became linked in a new international network in which changing artistic priorities and possibilities emerged from the ruins of the old.

Crow examines how artists of this period faced dramatic circumstances, from political condemnation and difficult diplomatic missions to a catastrophic episode of climate change. Navigating ever-changing pressures, they invented creative ways of incorporating critical events and significant individuals into fresh artistic works. Crow discusses, among many topics, David’s art and pedagogy during exile, Ingres’s drive to reconcile religious art with contemporary mentalities, the titled victors over Napoleon all sitting for portraits by Lawrence, and the campaign to restore art objects expropriated by the French from Italy, prefiguring the restitution controversies of our own time.

With abundant illustrations, Restoration explores how cataclysmic social and political transformations in nineteenth-century Europe reshaped artists’ lives and careers with far-reaching consequences.