Jacques-Louis David Gallery

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Jacques-Louis David - The Death of Socrates (1787) Painting

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Jacques-Louis David - The Death of Socrates (1787) Painting

Jacques-Louis David was born into a prosperous middle-class family in Paris on August 30, 1748. In 1757 his mother left him to be raised by his uncles after his father was killed.

He was never a good student in school- in his own words, “I was always hiding behind the instructors chair, drawing for the duration of the class”.

When David was 16 he began studying art at the Académie Royale under the rococo painter J. M. Vien. After many unsuccessful attempts, he finally won the Prix de Rome in 1774, and on the ensuing trip to Italy he was strongly influenced by classical art and by the classically inspired work of the 17th-century painter Nicolas Poussin. David quickly evolved his own individual neoclassical style, drawing subject matter from ancient sources and basing form and gesture on Roman sculpture.

His famous “Oath of the Horatii” was consciously intended as a proclamation of the new neoclassical style in which dramatic lighting, ideal forms, and gestural clarity are emphasized. Presenting a lofty moralistic (and by implication patriotic) theme, the work became the principal model for noble and heroic historical painting of the next two decades. It also launched his popularity and awarded him the right to take on his own students.

After 1789, David adopted a realistic rather than neoclassical painting style in order to record scenes of the French Revolution (1789-1799). David was very active in the Revolution, being elected a deputy to the National Convention on September 17, 1792. He took his place with the extremists known as the Montagnards- along with Marat, Danton, and Robespierre.

During this time he had produced deeds both positive and negative: On the positive side he proposed the establishment of an inventory of all national treasures- making him one of the founders of France’s museums. In fact, he played an active role in the organization of the future Louvre, Paris.

On the negative side, his radicalism during the Revolution bred within him a certain madness. He was appointed to the Committee of General Security in 1793- which gave him the power to sign nearly 300 arrested individuals to be guillotined. After the end of the Revolution, imprisoned because of his actions during the Reign of Terror, he wrote a letter to a friend stating, “I believed, in accepting the post of legislator- an honorable post, but one very difficult to fulfill- that an upright heart would suffice, but I was lacking in the second quality, by which mean insight.” A delegation of his students demanded his release, and he was freed on December 28, 1794.

Near the end of 1797 he met Napoleon Bonaparte. From 1799 to 1815 he was Napoleon’s official painter, chronicling the reign of Napoleon I in huge works such as “The Coronation of Napoleon and Josephine”. Following Napoleon’s downfall in 1815, David was exiled to Brussels, where he returned to mythological subjects drawn from the Greek and Roman past. He stayed there until his death on 29, 1825.

David, throughout his career, was also a prolific portraitist. Smaller in scale and more intimately human than his larger works, his portraits, such as the famous “Madame Récamier”, show great technical mastery and understanding of character. Many modern critics consider them his best work, especially because they are free from the moralizing messages and sometimes stilted technique of his neoclassical works.

David’s career represents the transition from the rococo of the 18th century to the realism of the 19th. His cool studied neoclassicism strongly influenced his pupils Antoine Jean Gros and Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, and his patriotic and heroic themes paved the way for the romantics.

1774 Antiochus and Stratonice

After many rejections, this painting won David the Academy’s first prize in 1774. The subject this time was also taken from ancient history. Erasistratus had been a Greek doctor and anatomist, the first man known to have dissected the human body. He was undoubtedly one of the fathers of modern medicine. Legend has it that he cured Antiochus, the son of Seleucus, King of Syria. This prince was afflicted with a malady that was causing him to waste away, and appeared to be incurable. Only Erasistratus was able to uncover the cause Antiochus was dying of love for his young stepmother, Stratonice. Erasistratus persuaded the old king to give his young wife to his son, who then fully recovered.
It is interesting to compare this picture to The Death of Seneca, painted by David only one year earlier, to see how far he had advanced in so short a time.

There are only nine figures in this painting, whereas there had been fourteen in The Death of Seneca. The composition here is not marred by the extravagant contrasts in the earlier painting; it is linear, rather than angular. The space between the two main groups of characters is uncluttered and the groups are distinct from one another.

On the left, Erasistratus is seated while Antiochus lies in bed; on the right, Stratonice is standing and Seleucus is leaning forward. In between, we have the elegant lines of Antiochus and his sickbed. The arrangement of the confidants and servants is discreet and appropriate to the occasion. The atmosphere is calm and noble–perhaps even a trifle too much so.

The magnificent ornamentation, the architecture worthy of an imperial palace, the majesty of the different personages–the composition as a whole has the air of a great spectacle, although one would be hard-pressed to identify the genre to which it belongs. It is not tragedy; it is not comedy; it is not opera, nor is it ballet. It is not a real illness or a real cure, but it is, all the same, a magnificent representation.

In this canvas, the painting- although still kept within the limits established by the Academy- is beginning to reflect a freer approach; David is beginning to find his way. Skillful and polished, this painting already displays the brilliance of a coloring that is starting to come to life.

The colors David would always favor- white, blue, yellow, red, flesh and gold tones, gray and brown- are arranged with grace and sup- pleness as they softly ascend toward the red of Erasistratus’s robe, the softer tone of the king’s toga, and the indigo blue of the large drapery hanging from the ceiling. The drawing is firm but gentle the body of Antiochus is superbly fresh, Erasistratus’s head is vigorously rendered and Stratonice’s face has a very pleasing delicacy. The lighting, however, is still arbitrary, and the architecture quite heavy and unbalanced.

Most vitally, this painting still lacks vigor and compactness. These qualities would not appear until later, after David had assimilated the true lessons of the Antiquity that here is still draped, decorated, and arranged in the affected manner of his age.

1781 Belisarius

David had just returned to Paris after his sojourn in Rome. He solicited the honor of being admitted to the Academy and participating in its annual exhibition with a history painting. The subject he chose belonged more to the sentimental genre of which his age was so fond than to the heroic genre. In this respect, both Belisarius and Saint Roch can be considered transitional works in David’s career.

Belisarius, a general under Justinian, was one of the greatest military commanders of his time and the spearhead of Byzantium’s attempts to rebuild the Roman Empire. His very successes, however, made him many enemies. Incriminated in a plot against Justinian, his eyes were put out on the Emperor’s orders in 561 A.D. According to the historian Procopius, Belisarius, stripped of all his possessions, was reduced to begging in the streets of Byzantium.

In this painting, Belisarius is begging for alms at the foot of a monument redolent of military triumph. The structure opens out onto a classical landscape dotted with tiny figures and shrubs, which forms a painting within the painting- evoking Poussin’s landscapes of the Roman countryside, but in a more geometric and architectural way.

This is a strong and sober work, centered around four expressive figures. Reticence and emotion emanate from the almost closed are formed by these personages. The woman is restraining her emotion; the faces of the child and the old man are admirably disposed in a contrapuntal and harmonious relationship.

Slightly tilted, one toward the right, the other toward the left, they seem to form two slopes, one in the light and the other in shadow. Their tresses are flowing and the old man’s beard brushes against the child’s curls. Beyond them, dumbstruck as he recognizes his former general in this beggar, a soldier throws up his arms. He stands there as erect as the colonnade, a ghost from the past.

The faces, which are very noble- those of the woman, the child, and the old man are particularly beautiful- personify different spiritual aspects of grandeur. The woman embodies delicacy, solicitude, and pity. The face of Belisarius exposes his suffering, which has been exacerbated by humiliation. Hennequin, David’s young pupil, posed for the child’s face, which is a cry of youth and entreaty.

The somewhat muted colors originate, for the most part, in a natural harmony with the sorrowful solemnity of the scene. Following Vien’s advice, David erased the woman’s red cloak and made it more subdued. A powerful shaft of light pierces the painting, pushing that which evokes the past or is a painful reminder of it into shadow. The bright white of the child’s clothing and the somber tone of the woman’s cloak are highlighted in homage to the purity of these two figures, while the face of Belisarius seems to be enshrouded by a gray nimbus, and the soldier seems frozen in a shadowy vigil.

It was on the basis of this painting that David was unanimously “approved” by the Academy in 1781. Belisarius was an immediate success, although some criticized its somberness. Diderot wrote: “This young man shows the grand manner in the way he has carried out his work; he has soul, his heads have expression without affectation, his attitudes are noble and natural, he draws, he knows how to cast a drapery and paint beautiful folds. His color is beautiful without being brilliant.”

1784 The Oath of the Horatii

This painting occupies an extremely important place in the body of David’s work and in the history of French painting. The story was taken from Titus-Livy. We are in the period of the wars between Rome and Alba, in 669 B.C. It has been decided that the dispute between the two cities must be settled by an unusual form of combat to be fought by two groups of three champions each. The two groups are the three Horatii brothers and the three Curiatii brothers.

The drama lay in the fact that one of the sisters of the Curiatii, Sabina, is married to one of the Horatii, while one of the sisters of the Horatii, Camilla, is betrothed to one of the Curiatii. Despite the ties between the two families, the Horatii’s father exhorts his sons to fight the Curiatii and they obey, despite the lamentations of the women.
David succeeded in ennobling these passions and transforming these virtues into something sublime. Thus had Corneille and Poussin also done. Moreover, David himself stated: “If I owe my subject to Corneille, I owe my painting to Poussin.” However, unlike Corneille, David finally decided to treat the beginning, rather than the denouement of the action, seeing that initial moment as being charged with greater intensity and imbued with more grandeur.

And, it was he who chose the idea of the oath (it is not mentioned in the historical accounts), transforming the event into a solemn act that bound the wills of different individuals in a single, creative gesture. He was not the first painter to do so, but certainly the first to do it in such a stirring manner.

If he was thus paying homage to the spirit of Poussin, from whose Rape of the Sabine Women he also borrowed the figure of the lictor for his drawing of the youngest Horatius, his conception was nonetheless much more sober and innovative. Instead of following a tight order, David disposed the figures in a spacious and rhythmical series. They stand out against something that resembles not so much an antique-style frieze as a three-dimensional proscenium, forcefully asserting their autonomy.

In addition, the viewer’s eye is spontaneously able to grasp only two superimposed orders- that of the figures and that of the decor. The first is striking because it is organized into three different groups, each with a different purpose.

To the appeal of the elder Horatius in the center, the reply on the left is the spontaneous vigor of the oath, upheld loudly and with a show of strength, while on the right it is a tearful anguish, movement turned in upon itself, compressed into emotion. The distance between the figures accentuates this contrast. To the heroic determination of the men the canvas opposes the devastated grief of the women and the troubled innocence of the children.

The decor is reduced to a more abstract order, that of architectural space- massive columns, equally massive arches, opening out onto a majestic shadow. The three archways loosely correspond to the three groups.

The contemplative atmosphere is softened by shades of green, brown, pink, and red, all very discreet. Instead of opening his painting out onto a landscape or an expanse of sky, David closes it off to the outside, bathes it in shadow. As a result, the light in this setting takes on a brick-toned reflection, which encircles his figures with a mysterious halo.

Through David’s rigorous and efficient arrangement, the superior harmony of the colors, and the spiritual density of the figures, this sacrifice, transfigured by the oath, becomes the founding act of a new aesthetic and moral order.

1788 Portrait of Monsieur Lavoisier and His Wife

Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier (1743-1794) was an eminent scientist. Elected to the Académie des Sciences at the age of twenty-five, he became the first great French chemist. In 1783, he was the first person to succeed in determining the composition of water and in synthesizing the compound from its elements. This discovery made him famous. He was also an extremely wealthy man. A Fermier-Général (tax collector for the Crown), he belonged to that class of financiers whose wealth would eventually arouse envy and precipitate its downfall. He was also a remarkable administrator. In recognition of his very diverse talents, he was elected alternate deputy to the States-General in 1789.
His wife, Marie-Anne Paulze (1758-1836), was the daughter of a Fermier-Général. She took drawing lessons from David, and was an intelligent, cultured woman with a passion for chemistry that matched her husband’s.

In this double portrait David has painted a happy couple–two intelligent, sensitive people who are united by their tenderness for each other. Aside from his portraits of the members of his own family, David, ever the realist, did not paint many common people. Most of his models came from the aristocracy and the haute-bourgeoisie. For this painting, David was paid an astronomical sum at the time: 7,000 pounds, or nearly double the amount he received as the royal commission for the Horatii.

He preferred the sublime to the unpretentious; the Lavoisiers, however, had both qualities. David expresses his respect and affection for them through the air of superior simplicity with which he has endowed them. What David is depicting in this portrait is charming virtue, natural talent, intimacy between two exceptional individuals. This is the core of the painting.

The balance, however, is admirable in its delicacy and harmony: the composition is enhanced by the dominant colors–red, black, blue, and white. Madame Lavoisier is wearing a full white dress whose folds form a reversed corolla. David has made the dress a soft, luminous mass that corresponds to the softness of her features and her gaze. Her husband’s black suit, far from being somber, takes on a kind of luster from the whites and reds around it. The warmth of the large red velvet table covering reinforces the subdued simplicity of the scene. The blond curls of Madame Lavoisier’s wig cascade down her back. Her aquamarine sash, tied like a ribbon on a gift box, and her husband’s bright cuffs and jabot are sparkling grace notes against the pure tones of their garments.

The laboratory instruments share this quietly shimmering quality. The distillation flask on the right has the transparency and brilliance of the finest glass, while the test tubes on the table have the flat, dense look of thick glass; each instrument has it’s own distinct texture and reflections play off their surfaces with a marvelous lightness.

They are in the picture to bear witness to the Lavoisiers’ experiments and their sole object is to serve as symbols and emblems. They are, above all, still life masterpieces. On the left, the portfolio on the chair is a reminder of Madame Lavoisier’s interest in art.

The overall movement of the painting, restrained and delicate, is skillfully contained in a triangle bisected by Lavoisier’s extended leg. This is not merely family tenderness- it is also amusing chemistry. It is a felicitous and quietly radiant display of David’s talent at its best.

1793 The Death of Marat

France was in danger and the Revolution was in peril. The Committee of Public Safety had just been created. The Reign of Terror had begun.
Marat, Robespierre’s friend, a deputy to the Convention, and editor-in-chief of L’Ami du Peuple, was a fiery orator; he was also a violent man, quick to take offense. Some saw him as an intransigent patriot; for others he was merely a hateful demagogue.

On July 13, 1793, a young Royalist from Caen, Charlotte Corday, managed, by a clever subterfuge, to gain entry into his apartment. When Marat agreed to receive her, she stabbed him in his bathtub, where he was wont to sit hour after hour treating the disfiguring skin disease from which he suffered.

David, who had been Marat’s colleague in the Convention, saw in him a model of antique “virtue.” The day after the murder, David was invited by the Convention to make arrangements for the funeral ceremony, and to paint Marat’s portrait. He accepted with enthusiasm, but the decomposed state of the body made a true-to-life representation of the victim impossible. This circumstance, coupled with David’s own emotional state, resulted in the·creation of this idealized image.

Marat is dying: his eyelids droop, his head weighs heavily on his shoulder, his right arm slides to the ground. His body, as painted by David, is that of a healthy man, still young. The scene inevitably calls to mind a rendering of the “Descent from the Cross.” The face is marked by suffering, but is also gentle and suffused by a growing peacefulness as the pangs of death loosen their grip.

David has surrounded Marat with a number of details borrowed from his subject’s world- the green covering, white sheet, and wooden packing case, and he has also added a few others, including the knife and Charlotte Corday’s petition, attempting to suggest through these objects both the victim’s simplicity and grandeur, and the perfidy of the assassin.

The petition (“My great unhappiness gives me a right to your kindness”), the assignat Marat was preparing for some poor unfortunate (“you will give this assignat to that mother of five children whose husband died in the defense of his country”), the makeshift writing-table and the mended sheet are the means by which David discreetly bears witness to his admiration and indignation.

The face, the body, and the objects are suffused with a clear light, which is softer as it falls on the victim’s features and harsher as it illuminates the assassin’s petition. David leaves the rest of his model in shadow. In this sober and subtle interplay of elements can be seen, in perfect harmony with the drawing, the blend of compassion and outrage David felt at the sight of the victim.

The painting was immediately the object of extravagant praise, then, returned by the Convention to David in 1795, it was rescued from obscurity only after his death. Misunderstood by the Romantics, who saw in it only a cold classicism, it was restored to a place of honor by Baudelaire, who wrote: “This is the bread of the strong and the triumph of spiritualism; as cruel as nature, this painting is redolent of the Ideal.

What then was that ugliness which Holy Death so quickly erased with the tips of her wings! Marat can henceforth defy Apollo, Death has kissed him with her loving lips and he rests in the tranquillity of his metamorphosis. There is, in this work, something at once tender and poignant; in the cold air of this room, on these cold walls, around this cold and funereal bathtub, a soul flutters….”

1799 The Sabine Women

We are in the early days of Roman history. The Romans have abducted the daughters of their neighbors, the Sabines. To avenge this abduction, the Sabines attacked Rome, although not immediately- since Hersilia, the daughter of Tatius, the leader of the Sabines, had been married to Romulus, the Roman leader, and then had two children by him in the interim. Here we see Hersilia between her father and husband as she adjures the warriors on both sides not to take wives away from their husbands or mothers away from their children. The other Sabine Women join in her exhortations.

After many preliminary compositional sketches, which occupied him for some time, David chose to set out in a totally new direction, marking a turning point in his artistic development. He himself explained that, finally, he had wanted “to go back to the source” and “return art to the principles followed by the Greeks.” It might surprise us that, in view of his intention to paint a picture that was “more Greek than the earlier ones,” David chose a Roman subject. But the term “Greek Art” should be understood here in the ideal meaning of the term.

French Artist Jacques-Louis David - The Intervention of the Sabine Women (1799) Painting
French Artist Jacques-Louis David – The Intervention of the Sabine Women (1799) Painting

As in his previous history paintings, David strove simultaneously for truth and grandeur. His figures are at one and the same time human beings and heroes. He borrowed his attitudes from classical bas-reliefs and his figures from contemporary models. .

The most striking thing about this painting is that the warriors are nude. David was inspired by the idea that the Greeks had represented their gods, athletes, and heroes in the nude. David was not seeking, as had Michelangelo, for example, to glorify masculine beauty, but rather to endow his heroes with a superior quality that, ultimately, was more moral than physical.

With the exception of Romulus, these nude bodies are not Particularly muscular. David wanted to refine, to strip away anything that was unnecessary, to reduce everything to a supreme, heroic simplicity. The element that we probably find most seductive about this painting today is the way in which David has projected and controlled the tumultuous movement of all the figures, which he then brings to an abrupt halt.

Hersilia and the other Sabine Women really seem to be bursting onto the scene, which they dominate. In contrast, the armies are only suggested, rather than represented, by a forest of lances, pikes, and standards; the leader of the cavalry puts his sword back in its sheath, the horses rear in a static, quivering motion; the two warriors who are about to clash are frozen in their attitudes, their furious precipitation arrested as they seem rooted to the spot.

David has also tamed his colors. Of his earlier palette, he has retained only some of the vivid reds on the shoulder of Tatius, Romulus’s helmet, and the robe of the woman behind Hersilia; elsewhere, the reds are shaded with brick-toned hues. Some yellows, not as bright as in earlier paintings, a bit of green on the old woman’s robe, and a bit of blue near Tatius’s foot recall the tones David had once preferred. In contrast, the nude bodies, the walls of Rome, the standards and the pikes, the horse’s hide, and Hersilia’s tunic make up a spectrum of clear bronzed tones under a slightly tinted sky.

He has totally abandoned any attempt at chiaroscuro or shadow effects. The light is everywhere. He wants to show the light as a triumphant but gentle mediatrix, like the Sabine Women.

1813 Portrait of Charlotte David (Madame David)

David painted almost all the members of his family and his wife’s family, with the exception of his mother (with whom his relationship appears to have been somewhat distant), and one of his sisters-in-law, Constance Hubert (whom he did not like).
That he apparently did not paint a portrait of his wife, Charlotte (1764-1826), before 1813- after thirty years of marriage- while he painted portraits of his father and mother-in-law soon after his marriage, and within the next few years, produced portraits of his wife’s sister and his brother-in-law, Emilie and Charles Seriziat, may tell us something about David’s wedded life.

However, the relationship between the Davids does not seem to have been troubled except during the Revolution. Evidently, David’s political attitude was the cause of their quarreling in 1793, although Madame David subsequently confessed to e’tourderies (flightiness). Her father had remained a Royalist and she reproached her husband for having voted in favor of the King’s execution. In March 1794, a divorce decree was issued and she moved into her parents’ house at Saint-Ouen. But, immediately following the fall of Robespierre and David’s arrest in August 1794, Charlotte took the first steps toward a reconciliation; she went to visit her husband with their children, and she made continual efforts to secure his release. David remarried her in November 1796 and their union thereafter was untroubled.

It was only progressively, however, and toward the end of David’s life that their relationship became imbued with a reciprocally strong emotion. She had always loved David; he would increasingly come to feel more gratitude and tenderness toward her, and she would become the charm of his old age.

In this portrait we see a slightly awkward woman. David did not flatter her in any way but, at the same time, he did her justice. As usual in David’s portraits, she is represented against a neutral ground and he has reduced the detail to a minimum. She is wearing her Sunday best, but aside from her cape and hat, she is dressed in the simplest satin dress. The hat is her only attempt at elegance. Madame David gazes at her husband with an embarrassed air. She barely dares to smile; she is snub-nosed, and behind her drooping eyelids we can see a rather faint attempt at animation.

She is very flattered that her husband is finally painting her portrait; she loves him; she would like to tell him so. She understands him and she admires him but, at the same time, she recognizes the differences between them. She has been a good wife and a good mother- that can certainly be said in her behalf. But she knows that she is no longer attractive; she is conscious of not having the gift of pleasing. She thought she might perhaps make herself a bit elegant. Was she right to put on her plumed hat?

David is accustomed to her. He appreciates her good qualities; he is conscious of how much he owes her, and is even touched by her devotion. He would like to show her his gratitude, so he paints her portrait, but he cannot make her sublime. He sees her as she is and he pays truthful tribute. This truth reveals to him the depth of his own personal attachment to his wife.

1824 Mars Disarmed by Venus and the Three Graces

This is the last great picture David painted. He began work on it in 1822 and completed it the year before his death.
David wanted to outdo himself once more. In December 1823, he wrote: “This is the last picture I want to paint, but I want to surpass myself in it. I will put the date of my seventy-five years on it and afterwards I will never again pick up my brush.”

The subject is taken from Creek mythology. Mars and Venus were the names given by the Romans to Ares and Aphrodite, the god of war and the goddess of love. The legend of their love affair corresponds to the charming idea that Beauty seduces and disarms Force. Aphrodite had a child, Eros, also called Cupid, and then had three girls, the Graces-Euphrosyne, Thalia, and Aglaia. The attributes of Mars were the lance and the sword, while Venus was represented by the turtledove, among other attributes. The three Graces were traditionally portrayed nude, entwined, or holding each other by the hand and dancing.

David was faithful to the legend, even down to these details, but his primary intention was to compose a sort of allegorical apotheosis. The scene takes place in a celestial Olympus, high above the famous mountain, in the midst of clouds. The faces are graceful and the feminine bodies very beautiful, especially that of Venus, which might be considered the most exquisite female nude ever painted by David. Mars looks very much like Leonidas, although his pose is much less contemplative.

The coloring is translucent and pearly, like painting on porcelain. The attitudes are conventional, the setting elaborate.

It was first exhibited in Brussels and then sent to Paris. Thiers, a journalist at the time, praised the color which “astonishes by its brilliance.” “Never,” he wrote, “has colored fabric been so perfect, so finely executed.” He also praised “the beautiful lines,” but he wondered “if the painting did not mark the end of the path on which David had set out.” He added that “if one does care for style to turn into academic pretentiousness, for drawing to turn into an imitation of statues, for color to be pushed to a tiresome clash of hues, to a studied transparency and the sheen of glass,” then, “one will consider David’s painting to contain some beautifully executed parts, but perhaps dangerous to propose as a model and, finally, the last word of a system that was good when it served as a corrective, which it can no longer be when it tends towards excesses that need to be corrected in turn.”

But David’s former pupils flocked to see the painting and were full of admiration. The exhibit brought in, after expenses, 13,000 francs, which means that there were more than 10,000 visitors, an enormous number for the time.

How could anyone not be moved by this famous old man’s farewell to painting- this is an enchanted world dedicated to grace and beauty, to their supreme victory over matter and force. What does it matter if the composition is theatrical! The smiles are lighthearted, the attitudes graceful, the gestures exquisite- and the female nudes are quite simply sublime. The aging painter dreamt a final dream of beauty, more chaste than in his youth, but physically more perfect than ever, and this is how we shall remember him.

From Wikipedia:

Jacques-Louis David (French: [ʒaklwi david]; 30 August 1748 – 29 December 1825) was a French painter in the Neoclassical style, considered to be the preeminent painter of the era. In the 1780s his cerebral brand of history painting marked a change in taste away from Rococo frivolity toward classical austerity and severity and heightened feeling, harmonizing with the moral climate of the final years of the Ancien Régime.

David later became an active supporter of the French Revolution and friend of Maximilien Robespierre (1758–1794), and was effectively a dictator of the arts under the French Republic. Imprisoned after Robespierre’s fall from power, he aligned himself with yet another political regime upon his release: that of Napoleon, the First Consul of France. At this time he developed his Empire style, notable for its use of warm Venetian colours. After Napoleon’s fall from Imperial power and the Bourbon revival, David exiled himself to Brussels, then in the United Kingdom of the Netherlands, where he remained until his death. David had many pupils, making him the strongest influence in French art of the early 19th century, especially academic Salon painting.

Early life

Jacques-Louis David was born into a prosperous French family in Paris on 30 August 1748. When he was about nine his father was killed in a duel and his mother left him with his well-off architect uncles. They saw to it that he received an excellent education at the Collège des Quatre-Nations, University of Paris, but he was never a good student—he had a facial tumor that impeded his speech, and he was always preoccupied with drawing. He covered his notebooks with drawings, and he once said, “I was always hiding behind the instructor’s chair, drawing for the duration of the class”. Soon, he desired to be a painter, but his uncles and mother wanted him to be an architect. He overcame the opposition, and went to learn from François Boucher (1703–1770), the leading painter of the time, who was also a distant relative. Boucher was a Rococo painter, but tastes were changing, and the fashion for Rococo was giving way to a more classical style. Boucher decided that instead of taking over David’s tutelage, he would send David to his friend, Joseph-Marie Vien (1716–1809), a painter who embraced the classical reaction to Rococo. There, David attended the Royal Academy, based in what is now the Louvre.

Each year the Academy awarded an outstanding student the prestigious Prix de Rome, which funded a 3- to 5-year stay in Rome. Since artists were now revisiting classical styles, the trip provided its winners the opportunity to study the remains of classical antiquity and the works of the Italian Renaissance masters at first hand. Called pensionnaire they were housed in the French Academy’s Rome outpost, which from the years 1737 to 1793 was the Palazzo Mancini in the Via del Corso. David made three consecutive attempts to win the annual prize, (with Minerva Fighting Mars, Diana and Apollo Killing Niobe’s Children and The Death of Seneca) with each failure allegedly contributing to his lifelong grudge against the institution. After his second loss in 1772, David went on a hunger strike, which lasted two and a half days before the faculty encouraged him to continue painting. Confident he now had the support and backing needed to win the prize, he resumed his studies with great zeal—only to fail to win the Prix de Rome again the following year. Finally, in 1774, David was awarded the Prix de Rome on the strength of his painting of Erasistratus Discovering the Cause of Antiochus’ Disease, a subject set by the judges. In October 1775 he made the journey to Italy with his mentor, Joseph-Marie Vien, who had just been appointed director of the French Academy at Rome.

While in Italy, David mostly studied the works of 17th-century masters such as Poussin, Caravaggio, and the Carracci. Although he declared, “the Antique will not seduce me, it lacks animation, it does not move”, David filled twelve sketchbooks with drawings that he and his studio used as model books for the rest of his life. He was introduced to the painter Raphael Mengs (1728–1779), who opposed the Rococo tendency to sweeten and trivialize ancient subjects, advocating instead the rigorous study of classical sources and close adherence to ancient models. Mengs’ principled, historicizing approach to the representation of classical subjects profoundly influenced David’s pre-revolutionary painting, such as The Vestal Virgin, probably from the 1780s. Mengs also introduced David to the theoretical writings on ancient sculpture by Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717–1768), the German scholar held to be the founder of modern art history. As part of the Prix de Rome, David toured the newly excavated ruins of Pompeii in 1779, which deepened his belief that the persistence of classical culture was an index of its eternal conceptual and formal power. During the trip David also assiduously studied the High Renaissance painters, Raphael making a profound and lasting impression on the young French artist.

 

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