The Bearded ones

Bearded the or Primitifs was a group of painters organized around the year 1800 by Pierre-Maurice Quays among the pupils of Jacques-Louis David. They are sometimes also called the “méditateurs” or the thinkers.

These primitive does not have relations with the primitive painters of the beginning of the Renaissance, nor with the movement of the Primitivisme appeared later in Western art.

Pushing the idea of the Neoclassicism to its extreme, the Bearded ones claimed a return to a painting based on the pure linear reasons for the Greek vases or on the simple compositions of the beginning of the Italian Renaissance. They choose their subject among Iliade and the Odyssey of Homère, the poems of Ossian or the Old Testament.

They extended their thought beyond painting to apply it to the life itself and were practically constituted in sect. Charles Nodier wrote that their doctrines,

“beyond painting reforms, reforms company, became a metaphysics. (…) The general feeling which held to them initially of religion (…) it was at the beginning the love, the fanaticism of Article By improve it, to purify it with the hearth of their heart, they had arrived at model nature, large nature and sublimates, and art did not offer to them any more, at this second time (…) that an object of comparison and that a resource of trade. Nature itself was reduced finally in front of their thought, because the sphere of their ideas had widened. They conceived that there was something of marvellous and incomprehensible behind the last veil of Isis, and they withdrew world, because they became insane, it is the word, like the therapeutists and the saints, insane like Pythagore and Plato. They continued however has to attend the workshops, to visit the museums, but they did not produce any more. ”

The Bearded ones chose a lifestyle except standards, getting dressed with ancient Greek clothing which attracted the gibes of crowd in the streets. David drove out them of his workshop after criticisms open uttered against him during the exposure of the Intervention of Sabines and they gathered in an abandoned monastery of the Paris region. In addition to Quays, the leader of the group, the Bearded ones were:

Even if it did not form part of their group, Ingres were certainly influenced by them during its education to the workshop of David, if not in their search for colors, at least in their obsession of the pure line.

The Bearded ones, absorptive in their research of the beauty and the pure line, produced only very few fabrics. There is not any known of Quays. It is necessary nevertheless to quote:

the Death of Hyacinthe (1801) of Jean Pitcher, Museums of Poitiers
Ossian reciting its poems (1800) of Duqueylar, Museum Granet with Aix. This table was refused by the critics of the Living room because considered to be odd.

The group quickly dissolves after the death of Quays starting from 1803.

Random links: