Reviews and Comments

Recounts the stories and most important artworks of some of the most important French Neoclassicists, examining their work through a biographical perspective. The first half of the book is more focused on David and Drouais, and the second spends a fair amount of pages on Girodet and how the former affected him. There’s also a chapter at the very end about Gericault, which I very much enjoyed.

I knocked off one star because of what I (and actual scholars, see James Smalls’s article “Making Trouble for Art History: The Queer Case of Girodet” for example) believe is an overly heteronormative judgement of some of the major works featured. The Sleep of Endymion is homoerotic at the same time as it is everything else Crow describes it as, for one, and these artists were much less rigidly heterosexual than Crow discusses here. However, this book is from 1995, and scholarship on the homoeroticism of the period really wasn’t very far along yet.

Regardless of that issue, Emulation is a deeply important piece of scholarship on its subjects which deserves its place in the bibliographies of so many articles, essays, and books that have followed in its wake.