probespierre

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not to be like jumping the gun here but i up and nowhere began writing a kind of robespierre essay with a special twist to it that no one asked for or wanted and is mostly held together with the strings of my mental issues so look forward to that in ten million years when thats done

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quelles sont les nouvelles?

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look at my lawyer dawg im going to the scaffold

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Pencil study

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After five years of study under Vien, David submitted his first Prix de Rome competition piece, the Combat of Mars and Minerva. He was initially declared the winner, but the prize was awarded to another student when Vien urged the jury to reverse its decision because David had not asked his permission to submit the work. After he failed again to win the prize in the following year David locked himself in his room for two days until friends, worried about his absence, found him there in an apparent attempt to take his own life by starvation.

— Warren Roberts, Jacques-Louis David, Revolutionary Artist: Art, Politics, and the French Revolution

this is exactly how it feels to be an artist, like david was so real for that

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WHEWWW second art post of the day can u tell I'm jobless.

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ive been feeling like i ought to make some kind of introduction for myself on this account because i created it to take part in a community of people who share the same passion for the french revolution as i do but who more than likely (definitely) know more about it & understand it more in depth than i. while i did take a class in high school for it its taken me a decade to revisit it and fall back in love with it now that i have the resources to actually pursue it. 

obviously, primarily, i’m most interested in robespierre & what’s been striking me having completed so far only mcphee’s robespierre, palmer's the twelve who ruled & curtis’s saint just, is that what i’m going to get from these books is only skimming the details of each person's philosophy. & what has been even more of a wake up call has been my beginning a reading of plato’s the republic, there’s nothing that interests me more than understanding how these figures developed & applied their values & so getting even a small peek into that through plato has felt an enormous insight. another thing is that while robespierre is my main focus of interest & who dragged me into all this in the first place i wanted to say that what i don’t have an interest in is remaining doggedly myopic about him & wholly disregarding opposing figures & accounts.

anyways… because primarily i’m focused on reading more than art output i hope i haven’t wrongly advertised myself to everyone, i still reserve some time for drawing maxime (embracing him with all my soul) but what i love even more is taking the time to understand him & the time & events he took part of and shaped. so, hello everyone!

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today is friday

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Another side project complete! This time in the form of the silhouette of Maximilien Robespierre. I'm pretty proud of this one, it was a real experiment for me and took me out of my comfort zone in a few different ways.

I've always really loved the aesthetic of silhouette portraits but it's definitely a style that lends itself more to the smooth lines of more "traditional" embroidery rather than cross stitch. I had abandoned ideas like this several times before this one. The turning point in making this pattern work was being able to get much more detail when working with higher count fabrics. Usually I default to 14 count, occasionally branching out to 16 or 18 when necessary. For this I stitched one over one on 28 count fabric. It was pretty horrendous to begin with and I couldn't work on it for very long before having to take a break but I did eventually get used to it. It is also an evenweave fabric as opposed to my preferred aida fabrics - this also meant I had to change my stitching method slightly to accommodate this. It's a pretty small piece, only 4" by 5", but I started it about three months ago I think? And though I did not work on it regularly, it was by no means a quick or easy project. Even just the way it's made with only one thread colour at times was Not Fun.

The actual silhouette part I made by just tracing a side profile engraving of him although turning it into a pattern did take forever to get right. More interesting to me was adding the initial. I was originally going to just stitch on his initials in whatever font looked best and then one day while looking at the signatures on a committee document, I came up with the bright idea of replicating his own handwriting. It was a real labour of love trying to get it as accurate as I could but I'm fairly happy with how it turned out. So yes, the R is based on Robespierre's signature.

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Just hear me out on a little thing for a moment …

(Also not dead! Just very busy)

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frev doodles 🫡

hope you like it :]

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i've been reading eugene newton curtis's saint-just, colleague of robespierre & he provides a quote from a letter from le bas & saint-just to robespierre:

Saint-Just added this postscript: Too many laws are made, too few examples: you punish only striking crimes, hypocritical crimes are unpunished. Punish a slight abuse in every party; that is the way to frighten evil persons and to make them see that the government has its eye on everything. Hardly does one turn his back when aristocracy becomes the fashion of the day and does harm under the color of liberty. Engage the Committee to give much prominence to the punish- ment of all faults in the government. You will not have done so for a month before you will have cleared up this labyrinth in which counter-revolution and revolution march pell-mell. Direct the society's attention, my friend [i.e., the Jacobins], to strong maxims of public welfare; let it occupy itself with the great measures needed to govern a free state. I invite you to take measures to find out whether all the factories and workshops of France are active and to favor them, for in a year our troops would be without clothing; the manufacturers are not patriotic, they do not want to work, they must be forced to and no useful establishment must be allowed to fail. We will do our best here. I embrace you and our common friends.

and then describes how saint-just talks to him in such a way that i can't help but think... why would you say that...

In this letter, Saint-Just's strong, dominating character stands out in sharp contrast to the chatty, amiable Le Bas. He talks to Robespierre as though he were the master. There was more in this than youthful bravado, for Saint-Just had wit and experience enough to realize that no one could reach the guillotine by any quicker road than by incurring Robespierre's hatred. That statesman was too serious to smile indulgently at the pertness of a handsome boy, too egotistical to listen patiently to advice from an inferior, hardly from an equal. It is clear that he was used to listening to it from Saint-Just, almost clear that he was used to taking it.

saint-just's strong, dominating character... talks to robespierre as though he were the master... almost clear that he was used to taking it... like that sure is some loaded language eugene

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my saint-just study (im so normal about him)

also hi im new 🫡

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Another style study on this guy, with a wigless version.

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:]

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ahaha

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bon-ami!