David's Telemachus and Eucharis: Reflections on Love, Learning, and History

[Mentor:] Son of the wise Ulysse He who has not felt his weakness and the violence of his passions is not however wise; for he does not at the same time understand himself and does not know in what manner to distrust himself.--Francois de La Mothe-Fenelon,

Le Aventures de Telemaque, 1699 [1]

This is not a frivolous novel

That is tendered here, reader, for your idleness;

A learned parable

Will make the reality glow in your mind. ...--"La Clef

de Telemaque," 1699 [2]

Understood as a sentimental depiction of mythological lover Jacques-Louis David's The Farewell of Telemachus and Eucharis (1818 Fig. 1) above the years has prompted little sustained interest or commentary when measured against the prolific literature upon his earlier production. [3] Since it was painted during a difficult time in David's life, when he was an aging political exile in Belgium, single might have expected from of the like kind a committed reformer a make submissive and style more dedicated to political and historical reflection. at the same time Telemachus and Eucharis has struck viewers as, at best, an aesthetic experiment binding Flemish colorism to the contours of grecian classicism, or as evidence of a late interest in psychological relationships. At worst, the painting is cited as an example of David's creative decline, for a certain number of nuanced by a suspicion of senility or of a selling on the outside to the demands of the marketplace. The artist appears to have forgotten or cautiously avoided his revolutionary ideals. plane the heroic exploits and torments of the image's textual referent--Francois tie Salignac de La Mothe-Fenelon's novel Le aventures de Telemaque, fils d'Ulysse first published above one hundred years earlier in 1699--seem to have been discarded in favor of soft sentiments and a glossy visual appeal.

Far from questioning the missing display of stirring action and evident moralizing in Telemachus and Eucharis, I tender this absence to be a necessary characteristic of the work. However, my reasons for doing for a like reason are quite different from those usually presented and indicate David's thorough understanding of the didactic and historical implications of representing Fenelon's text

First of all, a distinction should be drawn between mechanisms internal to the painting that function to challenge and delay interpretation and an external, historiographical resistance to a search for meaning in Telemachus and Eucharis. As a accrue of the early typecasting of David as a creator of stoic and virile works, a bearing has arisen to disregard those of his images that do not obviously align themselves with his wait fored heroic mode. The subject of Telemachus and Eucharis, as all of David's history paintings dealing with amorous themes, [5] is at short intervals designated as "mythological." Such themes, as a event have largely escaped the kind of serious attention devot to his make subordinates drawn from Greek, Roman, and French history, with their more obvious relevance to the politics of the Revolutionary period. David's brand of Neoclassicism, exemplified by means of the Oath of the Horatii, is in like manner closely identified with artistic and social reform that his amorous make subordinates have been generally treated as anoma lies painted for aristocratic patrons, becoming guilty by dint of association with what by 1785 the artist himself had present the appearanceed to root out from the overgrown garden of the Rococo: the decorative, the erotic, the private, and anything that lacked social utility.

Despite similar historical predispositions, we need to recognize that David's images of delight in are quite unlike the delectable (and unreasonably maligned) mythologies of the ancien regime. individual of the purposes of this research is to increase awareness that David's shows of lovers do operate, although abundant more subtly than his heroic works, according to the painter's abiding conviction that art should work for moral and social functions in addition to aesthetic singles David's mythological subjects are at no time drawn from the source preferr by means of seventeenth-and eighteenth-century painters, Ovid's Metamorphoses. Telemachus and Eucharis, for example, was inspired through a modern French prose epic based upon the Odyssey. In addition to this serious, heroic lineage, David's make submissive formulates moral lessons, but here end an appropriately calculated indirection. Indeed, the innocent appearance of David's lover is designed in part as an attractive packaging of didactic material and, beyond that, as an initial challenge to the viewer that be under the orders ofs one of the most compelling messages of the pair image and text: the necessity of living end the humbling enslavement to one's faculty of perceptions misapprehensions, and passions in order to acquire wisdom.

Further inquiry of the image and its literary and historical connections reveals more, however, than a didacticism that is at one time pleasurable and experience-based. Seen in relation to its conceptual pendant, Cupid and Psyche (1817 Fig. 2) as well as to Fenelon's novel, written for the education of an heir to the French chair of state Telemachus and Eucharis reveals David's late interest in a bring under rule that reflected, in a suitably indeterminate manner, upon the past, on the at hand and on possibilities for the time to come Under the guise of fiction, the work thus partially fulfills the function of a historical memoir. For David to undertake of that kind a project would not be unusual. In exile, he was environed by ex-patriots writing their hold memoirs, and at the opening of his eighth decade, each new painting begun in Brussels must have have the appearanceed to the aging artist like his last opportunity for a summation or testament. [6]