Jacques-Louis David

• 1. Introduction

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  Jacques-Louis David was born in Paris on the 30th of August 1748, into a world of powdered wigs, gilded ceilings, and a painting style built on prettiness. He would spend his life tearing all of it down. By the time he died on the 29th of December 1825, he had painted the death of a revolutionary martyr, orchestrated the coronation of an emperor, survived two prison terms, and outlived the very regimes he had served. His career stretched across six different political orders in France. How does a painter become, in turn, a propagandist, a survivor, a courtier, and finally an exile? The answer runs through some of the most turbulent decades in modern European history, and through one man's volatile, brilliant, sometimes dangerous personality.

• 2. A Difficult Student

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  At around age nine, David's father was killed in a duel, and his mother left him in the care of his well-off architect uncles. They arranged for his education at the Collège des Quatre-Nations, part of the University of Paris, but David was never a good student. He had a facial tumor that impaired his speech, and he spent his time covering his notebooks with drawings. He later recalled that he was "always hiding behind the instructor's chair, drawing for the duration of the class." His uncles wanted him to become an architect. He refused, and eventually won permission to train under François Boucher, the leading French painter of the time and a distant relative. Boucher recognized that tastes were shifting away from the Rococo style he himself practiced, and so passed David on to his friend Joseph-Marie Vien, a painter who had embraced the classical reaction against Rococo.

  Vien brought David into the Royal Academy, then housed in what is now the Louvre. The academy's most coveted prize was the Prix de Rome, which funded a stay in Italy of three to five years, offering winners direct contact with classical antiquity and Renaissance masters. David made three consecutive attempts to win it, with paintings including Minerva Fighting Mars, Diana and Apollo Killing Niobe's Children, and The Death of Seneca. Each failure, according to accounts, deepened a grudge toward the institution he would never entirely shed. After his second loss in 1772, he went on a hunger strike that lasted two and a half days before faculty persuaded him to resume painting. He resumed with conviction, then failed again the following year. In 1774, he finally won the prize with a painting of Erasistratus Discovering the Cause of Antiochus' Disease. In October 1775, he traveled to Rome with his mentor Vien, who had just been named director of the French Academy there.

• 3. Rome and the Classical Turn

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  In Italy, David studied seventeenth-century masters including Poussin, Caravaggio, and the Carracci. He declared that "the Antique will not seduce me, it lacks animation, it does not move", yet filled twelve sketchbooks with drawings that he and his studio used as model books for the rest of his life. In Rome he was introduced to the painter Raphael Mengs, who pushed against the Rococo tendency to sweeten ancient subjects and instead advocated rigorous study of classical sources. Mengs profoundly shaped David's pre-revolutionary style. Mengs also directed him to the theoretical writings of Johann Joachim Winckelmann, the German scholar now considered the founder of modern art history. As part of the Prix de Rome, David visited the newly excavated ruins of Pompeii in 1779, which deepened his conviction that the persistence of classical culture pointed to its enduring formal power.

  When David returned to Paris in July 1780, he found people ready to support him. Both paintings he submitted were accepted for the Salon of 1781, a notable distinction. The King granted him lodging in the Louvre, a prized privilege. The contractor of the King's buildings asked David to marry his daughter, Marguerite Charlotte, and that marriage brought David financial stability and eventually four children. He was commissioned by the government and assembled about fifty pupils of his own. Deciding that only Rome would let him paint Romans convincingly, he persuaded his father-in-law to fund another Italian trip. He went with his wife, three students, and Jean-Germain Drouais, the Prix de Rome winner of that year. In Rome, he painted the Oath of the Horatii in 1784, a work that planted republican ideals in classical imagery and planted David's reputation across Europe.

• 4. Revolution and Propaganda

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  By the time of the Salon of 1787, David exhibited The Death of Socrates. Critics compared it to Michelangelo's Sistine Ceiling and Raphael's Stanze; one visitor, after ten visits, called it "in every sense perfect." Denis Diderot said it looked as if David had copied it from an ancient bas-relief. Two years later, David showed The Lictors Bring to Brutus the Bodies of His Sons, timed, whether he intended it or not, to coincide with the opening days of the Revolution. The National Assembly had been established and the Bastille had fallen. The royal court feared the painting's republican symbolism and tried to block it. When newspapers reported the ban, public outcry forced the court to allow it. The painting was hung in the exhibition, protected by art students.

  David joined the Jacobin Club and sat in the National Convention alongside Jean-Paul Marat and Robespierre. He voted in the Convention for the execution of Louis XVI. His wife Marguerite Charlotte, a royalist, divorced him for it. David earned the nickname "ferocious terrorist" in the Convention. He became effectively the arts director of the Republic, and turned his organizational skills toward theatrical public festivals. In 1791, he was appointed to head the committee for the ceremonial reburial of Voltaire in the Panthéon. As many as 100,000 people watched the procession through the streets of Paris. David went on to create festivals for revolutionary martyrs, drawing on the rituals of pagan Greek and Roman ceremony, and crafting new symbols including a reimagined Hercules figure to represent the collective power of the people rather than the old monarchy.

  The painting he planned to capture the Tennis Court Oath of 1789 revealed the limits of political art in a revolution that moved faster than any canvas could. The project was commissioned, funded partly by over three thousand subscribers, and begun at massive scale. But by 1792 the political unity the painting was meant to celebrate had collapsed. Many of the heroes of 1789 had become, in the language of radicalized France, the villains of 1792. David left the canvas unfinished, with only a few figures sketched in.

• 5. Marat and the Martyrs

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  On the 13th of July 1793, Charlotte Corday gained entry to the home of Marat on the pretense of delivering a list of enemies of France. Marat, a journalist and member of the National Convention, suffered from a painful skin disease that drove him to work submerged in his bath, a board laid over it as a makeshift desk. He told Corday that the people she named would be guillotined the following week. She stabbed him immediately. She was guillotined shortly thereafter.

  David organized the funeral and undertook the painting that would become his most celebrated work. Marat's body was to be displayed with his wound visible and his right arm extended, still holding the pen he had used to write his lists of suspects. The corpse had already begun to putrefy. It had to be periodically sprinkled with water and vinegar as mourners crowded to view it on the 15th and the 16th of July. The stench grew so severe that the funeral had to be moved to the evening of the 16th.

  The Death of Marat, 1793, was later called the Pietà of the revolution. Presenting it to the Convention, David said, "Citizens, the people were again calling for their friend; their desolate voice was heard: David, take up your brushes..., avenge Marat... I heard the voice of the people. I obeyed." The painting portrayed Marat with the marks of the real murder in a composition that recalled the iconography of Christ's deposition. It was the leading image of the Terror. David had already set the pattern with an earlier work: Le Peletier Assassinated, painted in less than three months following the killing of Louis Michel le Peletier de Saint-Fargeau on the 20th of January 1793. In that painting, the assassin's sword hung above Le Peletier's body by a single strand of horsehair, alluding to the ancient tale of the Sword of Damocles. Le Peletier's royalist daughter later destroyed the original. It survives only through a drawing, an engraving, and written accounts.

• 6. Imprisonment and Reinvention

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  When Robespierre was seized by plotters at the National Convention, David called out to his friend, "if you drink hemlock, I shall drink it with you." He then fell ill and missed the evening session that would have placed him among the arrested. He was imprisoned twice: first from the 2nd of August to the 28th of December 1794, and then from the 29th of May to the 3rd of August 1795. Much of that time was served in the Palais du Luxembourg, where he painted his own portrait and that of his jailer.

  After his wife visited him in prison, David began work on The Intervention of the Sabine Women. He said the painting was made to honor his wife, with the theme of love prevailing over conflict; it was also widely read as a plea for national reconciliation after the bloodshed of the Terror. He developed a new approach he called the "Pure Greek Style", moving away from the muscular, angular figures of his earlier history paintings toward smoother, more feminine forms. The style drew again on the writings of Winckelmann. In David's own words, "the most prominent general characteristics of the Greek masterpieces are a noble simplicity and silent greatness in pose as well as in expression." He remarried his former wife Marguerite Charlotte in 1796. The Sabine Women brought him to the attention of Napoleon Bonaparte.

• 7. Court Painter to an Emperor

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  David had sketched Napoleon in 1797, recording the general's face during a brief sitting. He noted Bonaparte's classical features. Napoleon asked David to join him on his Egyptian expedition in 1798; David declined, unwilling to leave the stability he had built. After Napoleon's coup in 1799 and his request to be depicted crossing the Alps, David produced Napoleon Crossing the Saint-Bernard. Napoleon had made the crossing on a mule, but requested that he be painted "calm upon a fiery steed." David complied.

  For The Coronation of Napoleon, commissioned in 1804 and completed between 1805 and 1807, David obtained floor plans of Notre Dame and had participants in the ceremony come to his studio to pose individually. Napoleon himself never sat for the painting; the only sitting David had obtained from him had been in 1797. Pope Pius VII sat for the work and actually blessed David. Napoleon came to view the canvas, stared at it for an hour, and said, "David, I salute you." He paid David twenty-four thousand Francs for the work. During the Empire period, David was promoted through the Légion d'honneur: Chevalier in 1803, Officier in 1804, and Commandeur in 1815. One of his students during these years was the Belgian painter Pieter van Hanselaere.

  David's proximity to power had consequences he could not always control. Among the death warrants he signed during the Terror was one for Alexandre de Beauharnais, a minor noble. Beauharnais's widow Joséphine later married Napoleon and became his empress. David depicted their coronation. He had also stood by as Antoine Laurent Lavoisier, whose portrait he had painted in 1788, was sent to the guillotine. Carle Vernet approached David to intervene on behalf of his sister Emilie Chalgrin; David refused, and she was executed. Vernet held him responsible.

• 8. Exile and Last Works

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  When the Bourbons returned to power, David appeared on the list of proscribed regicides. Louis XVIII offered him both amnesty and the position of court painter. David refused the position and chose exile in Brussels, in what was then the United Kingdom of the Netherlands. There he trained Belgian artists including François-Joseph Navez and Ignace Brice, painted mythological scenes and portraits of local citizens and Napoleonic émigrés, and lived quietly with his wife.

  His final major work, Mars Being Disarmed by Venus and the Three Graces, was made between 1822 and 1824. 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 finished canvas was shown first in Brussels and then in Paris, where former students came to see it. The exhibition brought in more than 13,000 francs after costs, meaning more than 10,000 people paid to view it.

  Even after a stroke in the spring of 1825 disfigured his face and slurred his speech, David continued working. He began an improved version of The Anger of Achilles, telling visitors to his studio, "this is what is killing me." His former pupil Gros wrote to congratulate him on its progress after hearing reports of the painting's merits. David was struck by a carriage while leaving a theater and died on the 29th of December 1825. Because he had voted for the execution of Louis XVI, he was denied burial in France. His body was interred in Brussels and moved in 1882 to Brussels Cemetery. Some accounts hold that his heart was buried at Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris, with his wife. The Anger of Achilles, the painting that had occupied his final months, was brought back to Paris in April 1826 by its commissioner, Ambroise Firmin-Didot, and included in an exhibition called "Pour les grecs."