Study of two nude women, in profile to the right, for Arria and Poetus

In 1785, French painting entered a "severe" phase, reflected as much in the austerity of its style as in the darkness of its themes. David's La Douleur d'Andromaque (The Sorrow of Andromache ) (Paris, Musée du Louvre) at the 1783 Salon had set the trend, and the subjects painted by his main competitors at the following Salon seemed to surpass him in pathos. Peyron and Vincent vied for first place in this register, each exhibiting the suicide of a stoic heroine, that of Alceste in the case of the former(Alceste se donnant la mort pour sauver les jours d'Admète, son époux, Paris, Musée du Louvre) and that of Arria in the case of the latter, declined in two different versions, one horizontal in the proportions of a cabinet painting (Saint Louis [Missouri], Saint Louis Art Museum), the other, a royal commission, developed in height and large dimension.

The last moments of the Roman senator Pœtus and his wife Arria, in 42 CE, were recounted by Pliny the Younger in his Letters. Involved in a conspiracy hatched by Scribon against Emperor Claudius, Caecina Pœtus (or Paetus) was arrested in Dalmatia and taken to Rome, where he was sentenced to death. Despairing of the emperor's clemency and refusing to see her husband taken to the rack, Arria urged him to take his own life. Seeing him indecisive, she thrust a dagger into his chest and, presenting it to him, uttered the words that history has retained and that the painter has translated into an image: " Poete, non dolet " ("Pœtus, it's not painful").

The depth of the prison-like darkness in which Vincent set his scene was intended to heighten its dramatic intensity, but compared to the expressive clarity of the Oath of the Horatii (Paris, Musée du Louvre) exhibited by David in the same Salon, the vogue for black tones now appeared to be a false trail on which his rivals had strayed. Until then, Vincent's reputation had been that of an artist "gifted with a delicate tact, an exquisite sensitivity": "he appropriated the manners of the greatest masters, he followed them without being their slave, appearing even in imitating them only to obey the impulse of his genius"(Discours sur l'origine des progrès et l'état actuel de la peinture en France contenant des notices sur les principaux artistes de l'Académie pour servir d'introduction au Sallon, Paris, 1785). Although the author of Figaro au Sallon admitted to being seduced byArria and Pœtus 's dark palette -" there is a darkness in this painting that attaches" - few critics forgave him for abandoning his brilliant palette for a "black and heavy coloring", and for renouncing his virtuoso execution for a rigid style. The characters' expressions, on the other hand, gave rise to contradictory judgments. Gorsas regretted that the artist "had so essentially missed the main purpose of his painting, and had not felt that he had to contrast the firmness of Arie saying the Poete non dolet, with the weakness that a woman carrying death in her bosom must feel". Carmontelle, on the other hand, invoking the sublime expression of the ancient Niobe, considered that "the weakness of nature and the firmness of courage do not clash on her physiognomy; they merge there in sweet accord; one must either no longer boast of the Medici head, or admire this one greatly".

The two nude studies in the Musée d'Orléans relate to the large painting executed for the King, presented at the Salon of 1785 and now conserved in Amiens. However, despite the fact that they have been squared off, the figures are not identical in the final composition; they are an extension of the intermediate version of the drawing in the Horvitz collection, whose postures they analyze: Arria is still pointing the blade of the dagger at herself, presenting its handle to Pœtus ; he is still depicted in strict profile, while the painter will turn his bust three-quarters to the side of the viewer to better expose him to the blade that will pierce him. The round, solidly-built plasticity of the female group is contrasted with the highly detailed anatomical description of the hero, treated almost in the manner of a flayed man. While it was Vincent's custom to draw his nude figures before painting them, in order to drape them with truth, the Pœtus academy shows an excess of muscular detail that this preparatory work did not justify, and which betrays the artist's taste for drawing practice. The sharpness of the contours and sculptural volume of the bodies, rendered in vigorously cross-hatched shadows, also reflect a desire for stylization that the artist rarely pushed so far. Clearly, the study of ancient statuary increasingly permeated his artistic practice, leading him to simplify his forms to the point of reducing them to an almost "Picassian" geometry (Cuzin). As Jean-Pierre Cuzin points out, "Vincent's paintings sometimes fail to live up to the tension and energy promised by the preparatory drawings". The two studies ofArria and Pœtus demonstrate better than the painting where the artist's modernity lies. Although he was unable to stand comparison with the author of Les Horaces at the Salon of 1785, the latter rarely showed himself as sovereign as Vincent in the field of drawing.