The Massacre of the Innocents

Navez painted this Massacre of the Innocents in 1824, in Brussels. He was 37, recently returned from a decade in Paris where he had studied under Jacques-Louis David, and he was establishing himself as the leading Neoclassical painter in the newly created Kingdom of Belgium. The painting shows the biblical massacre ordered by Herod, the killing of all male infants in Bethlehem. Soldiers tear babies from their mothers' arms in the foreground. A woman at the center fights a soldier with her bare hands, her child pulled from her grasp. At the left, a mother tries to flee with her infant. At the right, a group of women huddle together, one holding a dead child. The architecture is Roman, a classical arcade with columns and arches, and the figures are arranged in a frieze across the foreground. Navez was a student of David, the leading French Neoclassical painter, and he followed David to Brussels in 1816 after David was exiled from France following the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy. The Massacre of the Innocents was painted for a Brussels patron and exhibited there in 1824. The composition owes a clear debt to David's Oath of the Horatii and to the Baroque treatments of the same subject by Rubens and Guido Reni, but the cool palette and the clean draftsmanship are Navez's own. The painting is not well known today. Navez is a minor figure in art history, overshadowed by his teacher David and by the Romantic painters who came after him. But this painting is a serious and accomplished work, one of the best Neoclassical history paintings in an American collection. The Met acquired it in 1971 from the Wrightsman collection. Oil on canvas, 117 by 134 centimeters, roughly 46 by 53 inches. Navez painted with a smooth, controlled surface, building the figures in thin layers of color over a careful underdrawing. The flesh tones are cool and even, the draperies crisp and sharply folded. The composition is tightly organized, with every figure placed to contribute to the narrative arc from left to right. The horizontal format and dramatic subject make this print work well in a living room or dining room with traditional furniture. The classical architecture and cool palette pair with neutral walls and dark wood. A gold frame suits the painting's Neoclassical style. The 16x20 or 18x24 size gives the figures and the architecture enough room to read. The painting is in the Met's collection, a gift from Mr. and Mrs. Charles Wrightsman in 1971. This is a public domain artwork (CC0), scanned from the original at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. We print it on archival matte paper at sizes from 8x10 to 18x24 inches, framed or unframed. The image is printed at full resolution with no cropping.