Jacques-Louis David casts a long shadow over portraiture during the period of the French Revolution, with the stern visages and intense gestures of members of the Third Estate in The Tennis Court Oath (1792); his iconic portrayal of Jean-Paul Marat lifeless in his bath (1793); his sensitive depiction of the Dutch republican Jacobus Blauw deep in thought at his desk (1795); and eventually his grandiloquent homages to Napoleon, including his portrayal of the Emperor’s coronation (1807). It is to Amy Freund’s immense credit that while she does not lose sight of David’s contributions to the genre, she gives the canonic artist only a cameo role in this absorbing, original, and skillful study of the social and political functions of portraiture in France during the 1790s and early 1800s.

Freund’s thesis is big and bold: “Portraiture, the genre most tethered to ordinary life and its contingencies, became after 1789 the form of visual representation best suited to reimagining the fundamental structures of self and nation” (235). Freund effectively overturns the prevailing view that history painting was the genre most strongly tied to the politics of the Revolution. She persuasively argues for the changing role of portraiture in representing a new type of citizen during a period of famously dramatic political events. She probes the variety of novel and experimental negotiations between artists and sitters to find a form of representation that eschewed the ceremonial trappings and pomposity of ancien régime portraits. While she builds on the distinguished work of historians and art historians in this field, including Tony Halliday, Carla Hesse, Michael Fried, Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, and others, Freund’s selection of case studies and her navigation of the complex terrain of Revolutionary and post-Revolutionary politics is quite distinctive and provides a sophisticated and deft reading of the selected portraits.

Freund sets the scene with a richly revealing chapter on the portrait market in the wake of the Revolution, demonstrating convincingly that Revolutionary iconoclasm was counterbalanced by a sustained consumer demand for portraiture. Fascinating observations here include the deluge of portraits that appeared in the Salon when its exhibition opened to all comers after 1791, the cluster of portraitists who lived and worked in the fashionable Palais Royale area near the Louvre, and the relative stability of portrait prices even during the Terror. Freund sees that the energy of a new political climate lured a fresh consumer base: “Portraitists, like marchands merciers, used the celebrity of their clients to attract new business” (31). Portraits varied from slight and cheap silhouettes to costly, monumental life-size representations. Freund provides convincing speculation that the consumers, as well as the subjects, of these works included the newly empowered commoners, or members of the Third Estate. Subsequent chapters contextualize and consider in detail a small number of key portraits representing Deputies to the Estates General, members of the National Guard, portraits during the Terror, and portraits of women and families. The chapters are thematic, but they are also subtly chronological, at once providing a picture of the period and a vivid analysis of individual works of art.

Freund’s method of analyzing portraits within their particular social, political, and personal milieus has both strengths and weaknesses. In each of her case-study chapters, she begins by walking the reader in detail through a specific portrait; she subsequently unravels the history of the portrait’s genesis and afterlife; and, finally, relates these revelations to several very broad Revolutionary concepts such as citizenship, nature, education, and the role of women and the family. Freund argues that portraiture is an inherently collaborative art, and therefore the changing political and social landscape meant that both artists and sitters took an exploratory approach to new ways of expressing the values of citizenship through the bodies, dress, and faces of individuals.

Freund is at her strongest when she is unpacking the complex history of individual portraits and demonstrating just how startling and inventive many of them were. A notable example here is her compelling discussion of Jean-Louis Laneuville’s portrait The Citoyenne Tallien in a Prison Cell at La Force, Holding Her Hair Which Has Just Been Cut (1796), reproduced on the book’s cover. The painting shows Cabarrus in an austere stone cell wearing an incongruously fashionable dress that contrasts with the coarse chain that trails across the edge of her skirt and the cracked jug of water and plain loaf of bread on the ledge behind her. The disturbing, sensual effect of Cabarrus clutching locks of her newly cut hair and the presence of a head that she sketched on the fissured wall behind her give the work an unsettling ambiance, and, in fact, it was removed from the Salon in 1796 because of the public’s squeamishness at its uncomfortable reminder of the Terror. Freund adroitly weaves Cabarrus’s fascinating and complex biography into her interpretation of this portrait: Cabarrus’s foreign origin, her marriage into the aristocracy, her divorce, her engagement with the radical Tallien in Bordeaux, her own experiments with portraiture, her authorship of educational tracts, and her imprisonment by the Jacobins. Romantic anecdotes surrounded her imprisonment, such as the story that she wrote letters using her own blood as ink and that she lured the guards to provide her with drawing tools so she could sketch their portraits on the prison wall. Freund probes these biographical details thoroughly and relates them back to Laneuville’s portrait, engagingly contextualizing it with images of other women prisoners, such as Charlotte Corday.

However, this portrait of Cabarrus (as Freund openly admits) is an exceptional one, as most of the novelty in portraiture during the Revolutionary period was confined to portraits of men, who were seen to represent most decisively the new ideals and values of citizenship. Freund therefore concentrates primarily on the sartorial choices, gestures, expressions, and settings of portraits of men who played public roles in the Revolution both before and after the Terror. In so doing, she shows the way ancien régime traditions of formal portraiture were transformed. The pre-Revolutionary conventions of the grand homme surrounded by trappings of their power and authority were translated into the more quotidian and historically specific settings of small full-length portraits such as Robert Lefèvre’s Portrait of a Man in the Landscape (1798). Chaussez portraits showing aristocratic men with the accoutrements of hunting were adapted and transformed into portraits of men of sensibility in natural settings, such as François Gérard’s sensitive depiction of the reluctant politician Louis-Marie de La Révellière-Lépeaux seated in a landscape with his copy of Carl Linnaeus’s Botanical Philosophy (1751) in one hand and a spray of wildflowers in the other.

Freund’s readings of individual portraits within their biographical and historical contexts are absorbing, elegant, and persuasive. However, when she moves too far from the specific, her larger claims can at times stretch credibility. Her view that “before the Revolution everyone knew what political sovereignty looked like” (49) provides the starting point for a series of arguments that the Revolution changed the history of portraiture and, indeed, the history of art, entirely. Thus the National Guard portrait was “a new mode of portraiture” (83); Gérard “invented a new kind of political portraiture and simultaneously reinvented the genre of portraiture in the landscape” (163); and, more broadly, this period was a “turning point in the history of art” (243). Of a portrait by Rémy-Furey Descarsin of an elderly pensioner of the National Guard with his wife, she writes, “Descarsin’s portrait uses . . . likenesses, and the symbolic power of the National Guard, to recount the history of one hundred years of oppression and the revolutionary seizure of power by the Third Estate” (107). She argues that the sugar at the center of Bizard’s portrait of a National Guard officer protecting a sugar cargo (1792) “opens the portrait up to larger issues of class, racial conflict, and the inclusiveness of the Revolution” (98). The portrait of Cabarrus, discussed above, is related to “the spirit of post-Thermidorian reconciliation. . . . Her skills as a portraitist, in other words, ended the Terror” (153).

Claims such as this can be merely rhetorical, but they also reinforce a kind of exceptionalist argument that has become common in the work of historians writing about France in this admittedly unique historical period. For example, many of the radical changes Freund attributes to portraiture and the portrait market in Revolutionary France had already occurred in England in the preceding decades. The re-badging of some portraiture as serving a higher purpose, akin to history painting, was a primary theme of Joshua Reynolds’s Discourses on Art (1769–90); the courting of celebrity and the tendency of artists to base their studios in fashionable parts of the metropolis were all true in London from the founding of the Royal Academy in 1768; Thomas Gainsborough experimented with new kinds of landscape settings for portraits in Mr. and Mrs. Andrews as early as 1750; and Joseph Wright of Derby’s Sir Brooke Boothby (1781) is a Rousseauian homme sensible painted sixteen years before Gérard’s portrait of La Révellière-Lépeaux.

These are quibbles rather than substantive points. Freund’s method of interpreting portraiture, the rigor of her research, and the intrinsic fascination of her case studies all deserve praise and provide a role model for how art historians can understand, and write about, portraiture.