Bienvenue!

Welcome to my blog of 19th century French painting! (Sorry, despite the blog title I don't speak French.)

Why another blog of French painting, when there are so many already? First, I feel I have a pretty good collection that I would love to share. Second, my presentation will be different than usual: rather than fairly random postings, or posting organized by artist (as many other blogs, and indeed my other painting blogs do), this will be a chronological blog: postings will begin with paintings from the year 1800 (one painting per day) and continue through 1910. Though the last bunch of postings will not strictly be 19th century, stylistically they are very much rooted in that century.

My blog principles:

1. I post paintings that I personally like. If a painting you know of isn't posted here, either I haven't encountered it (quite likely possibility) or it doesn't strike my fancy. Life's too short to post paintings I don't like.
2. Many if not most of the images have undergone mild editing from me.  This usually takes the form of color correction and brightness/contrast adjustment. In anticipation of criticism from historical purists, I say this: I'm interested in the paintings as images, not as historical artifacts. Plus, color correction often removes the yellowing of varnish that tends to afflict older paintings, so many of my color corrected images may be closer to the original than uncorrected ones. However, I make no claims that my posted images are in any way exact analogues of the existing physical paintings. 
3. Paintings are dated to the best of my ability. When a range of dates is given for a painting, I will place it chronologically at the recent end of the range rather than the older (because date ranges for paintings often indicate start and completion times). 
4. Obviously, many paintings are undated. Periodically I will interrupt the chronological stream to insert some of the undated paintings (so I'm not left with a huge pile of them at the end).
5. I post only relatively high-resolution images (preferably 1024 or higher in one dimension). This, of course, means that many worthy paintings will be left out of this blog because high-resolution scans of them don't exist. I make no apologies - a 500-pixel-wide image doesn't do much for me.
6. As far as I know all images posted here are public domain. If anyone has information to the contrary, please inform me and I will remove the image(s) in question.

So here we go with the first painting, and it's a famous one: Jacques-Louis David's Napoleon Crossing the Saint Bernard.

The dramatic scene here is from Napoleon's crossing of the Alps to attack the Austrians. In fact, there are no fewer than five separate versions of this painting in existence, so David got a lot of mileage (and no doubt income) out of it. There is much written about this painting, and I'll post links below for those wanting further information about it, but let me just point out this (which I didn't notice for a long time): at bottom left three names are shown inscribed into the rocks: Annibal (Hannibal), Karolus Magnus (Charlemagne) and Bonaparte. Clearly this is placing Napoleon in august historical company, and his name being more prominent and positioned above the others is doubtless intended to convey the message that Napoleon is the natural successor to those great historical figures.

More information about this can be found at these sites:

• Wikipedia
• Smart History
• National Gallery of Victoria

There are a lot more paintings of Napoleon to come. Although he was defeated fairly early in the 19th century, he cast a long shadow over France for many decades.

So, again, welcome, and I hope you enjoy the journey.