Louvre treasures at the Morgan Library

One of the most striking pieces in the show of Picasso drawings currently at the Frick Museum is one of his own left hand, clawlike, ugly, and all but lifeless-looking. Artists examining their own hands— a natural-enough preoccupation—have been common since Dürer, but I had to wonder whether Picasso had known of Théodore Géricault's death-bed drawing of his own left hand, which happens also to be on exhibit in New York this month as part of the Morgan Library's show of drawings from the Louvre.

Géricault was only 32 and already at the height of a career that might well have proved one of the greatest in French art. Whether it's the best drawing in the Morgan's show is a matter of taste, but it's certainly the most poignant.

Unlike Picasso's drawing, Géricault's hand is delicate, sensitive and shapely. It's also tense with life, or at any rate the struggle for life, the fingers splayed and the veins engorged.

But in its way it's profoundly clinical too. Géricault was already too weak to paint; drawing was the only medium left to him. He gathered his remaining forces to depict the one subject available to him.

As with Picasso, the hand is disconnected, severed. But Picasso was only dabbling with death; at 21, he had 70 years left to live. Géricault had weeks, or perhaps days. He objectified his own dying, and poured all his desperate desire for life into it.

Revolutionary France certainly had its share of death, as did its Napoleonic aftermath. Jacques-Louis David made his career by portraying the Revolution in the garb of Roman heroism, although he also captured the street life of Paris in the days of the Terror, including the unforgettable sketch of Marie Antoinette on her way to the guillotine.

Napoleon's simpering pride

We don't have that here, but we do have the remarkable depiction of Napoleon crowning himself emperor of the French in 1804, the event that marked the death of the Republic. Napoleon has just seized the crown from Pope Pius VII, self-legitimizing himself and reducing the hapless pontiff to the role of a manservant. David would have to make his own obeisances to the new dispensation, but he captures Napoleon here in all the simpering, egotistical pride that goes before a mighty fall.

A generation later, Eugène Delacroix would celebrate the return of liberty— prematurely, alas— in the Revolution of 1830, and this show includes a fine preliminary sketch for his Liberty Leading the People. But the show isn't for the most part concerned with politics. Even Daumier's savage caricatures of the July Monarchy get short shrift, and Géricault's left hand, not to mention Proudhon's nudes or Corot's landscapes, have very little to do with the ups and downs of French public life in the late 18th and early 19th Centuries.

Not that we will object to this, or to almost anything in the 80 works on display. It's hard to single out any single stretch of French draughtsmanship in the nearly 300 years between Claude and Cézanne for special praise because the level is so consistently high and inventive, but the 60-odd years covered here, bridging the Classical and Romantic eras, show a particular variety.

Vogue for the exotic

Some things remain constant: French artists continue to seek inspiration in Italy, and the expanding horizons of French imperial interests can be seen in the vogue for the exotic found in such figures as Girodet, Delacroix, and Ingres. The former two are nicely represented: Girodet, little known outside France but well worth acquaintance, and Delacroix, who can remind you of Rembrandt in one work (The Death of St. Peter) and seem to be anticipating late Picasso with another (Studies for the Death of Sardanapalus).

Géricault has several fine studies in addition to the study of his hand; there's a sketch for the central figure of his masterpiece, The Raft of the Medusa, one of the iconic works of 19th-Century art, and a stunning sheet of feline heads (cats, and a leopard) that captures animal character and ferocity as well as anything you'll ever see. But the lesser, even obscure names— Paul Huet, Eugène-Louis Lami, Dominique Papety, Henri Lehmann— are all represented by first-rate work.

I'm sure the Louvre could have put together a more focused and less miscellaneous show on the theme of revolutionary politics. But what a miscellany! With stuff this good, any label works for me.