David's Admirers

Whatever inspiration they may have given him in life, women have been some thing of a cross to the fame of Jacques-Louis David, the painter-prophet of the French Revolution. Eleven years ago, Manhattan's Metropolitan Museum of Art announced the unhappy fact that one of its most popular paintings -- a portrait of a young woman, attributed to David and valued at some $100,000 -- was not by David at all. The real artist was Constance Marie Charpentier, an obscure but obviously admiring David follower. Last week, David was in the news again. In the scholarly French review Gazette des Beaux-Arts, Dealer Georges Wildenstein proclaimed that another painting attributed to David -- a portrait of the violinist Antonio Bartolommeo Bruni, which the Frick Museum bought in 1952 -- was actually by another female admirer, Mme.

Cesarine Henriette Flore Davin-Mirvault.

The Met's 1951 announcement was the result of some alert detective work by Charles Sterling, curator of the Louvre and for a while the Met's foreign adviser.

After noting certain stylistic deficiencies in the portrait of the young woman. Ster ling found documentation in the form of an obscure album containing drawings of every single painting exhibited in the Paris Salon in 1801. David had boycotted the exhibition -- but the album contained several works by Constance Charpentier that year, including the painting thought to have been a David. Recently Dealer Wildenstein went back to the same al bum, which also includes sketches for the Salon of 1804. There he came upon the Frick's David under "Painting No. 114." But the legend in the catalogue read: "Mme. Davin-Mirvault, portrait of Signor Bruni, composer, former conductor of the orchestra at the Opera-Buffa."

Mme. Davin. the daughter of a geographer and the goddaughter of a marquise, presided over small dinner parties that artists and musicians, now long forgotten, loyally attended. She exhibited fairly often, was always listed in catalogues as a pupil of David. But had she even known the violinist named Bruni? For the answer to that, Wildenstein went to the diaries of a certain Mme. Moitte, one of Mme. Davin's cattier friends. On Feb. 3, 1806, Mme. Moitte went to Mme. Davin's for dinner. She reported that the wine was inferior, that the fried cakes were undercooked, and that the candles "reeked of grease." As a final social note, she added that Mme. Davin sang and that Signor Bruni "played the violin."

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