Jacques-Louis David

gigatos | May 29, 2022

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Summary

Jacques-Louis David was a French painter and conventional born on August 30, 1748 in Paris and died on December 29, 1825 in Brussels. He is considered the leader of the neo-classical movement, whose pictorial style he represents. He broke with the gallant and libertine style of 18th century rococo painting represented at the time by François Boucher and Carl Van Loo, and claimed the heritage of Nicolas Poussin”s classicism and Greek and Roman aesthetic ideals, seeking, in his own words, to “regenerate the arts by developing a painting that the Greek and Roman classics would have unhesitatingly taken for their own”.

Trained at the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture, he became a renowned painter in 1784 with The Oath of the Horatii. A member of the Royal Academy, he fought against this institution during the Revolution and, in parallel to his artistic career, began a political activity by becoming a deputy to the Convention and organizer of revolutionary celebrations. His commitment led him to vote for the death of King Louis XVI, and his support for Maximilien de Robespierre led to his imprisonment during the Thermidorian reaction. His political activities came to an end during the Directoire, he became a member of the Institute and became an admirer of Napoleon Bonaparte. He put himself at his service when the latter acceded to the imperial power, and he realized for him his greatest composition The Rite of Napoleon.

Under the Restoration, his past as a revolutionary regicide and imperial artist led to his exile. He took refuge in Brussels and continued his artistic activity until his death in 1825.

His work is exhibited in most museums in Europe and the United States, and for the most part in the Louvre Museum. It consists mainly of history paintings and portraits. He was a master for two generations of artists who came from all over Europe to train in his studio which, at its peak, had some forty students, of whom Girodet, Gérard, Gros and Ingres were the most famous.

He was one of the most admired, envied and hated artists of his time, as much for his political commitments as for his aesthetic choices.

Childhood

Jacques-Louis David was born in Paris on August 30, 1748 at 2 quai de la Mégisserie, into a middle-class family. His father, Louis-Maurice David, was a wholesale iron merchant in Paris. Although it was believed for a long time that he acquired a position as “commis aux aydes” (equivalent to tax collector) in Beaumont-en-Auge in the Generalitat of Rouen (now in the department of Calvados) in order to rise socially, recent research shows that this was not the case: Louis-Maurice was in fact bankrupt and from then on had a small salaried job, moving away from Paris, like many bankrupt merchant-merchants. His mother, Marie-Geneviève, born Buron, belongs to a family of master masons; his brother François Buron is an architect of the “Eaux et Forêts”, his brother-in-law Jacques-François Desmaisons is an architect and his second brother-in-law Marc Desistaux is a master carpenter. On her mother”s side, she is also a first cousin of the painter François Boucher.

Jacques-Louis David was baptized on August 30, 1748, the day of his birth, in the church of Saint-Germain-l”Auxerrois in the presence of Jacques Prévost, a pewter merchant, and Jeanne-Marguerite Lemesle, wife of Jacques Buron, a master mason, his godfather and godmother, as indicated in his baptismal certificate.

The young David was sent to boarding school at the convent of Picpus until December 2, 1757, when his father died at the age of thirty. Among the first biographers of David, Coupin, followed by Delécluze and Jules David, attributed the cause of death to a sword duel. But A. Jal noted that the death certificate gave no indication of the circumstances of Louis-Maurice David”s death. David was then nine years old and his mother called upon his brother François Buron to help her with the education of her son. After having him follow courses with a tutor, she makes him enter the college of Quatre-Nations in the class of rhetoric. From then on, she retired to Évreux and left the entire education of David to his brother. Having noticed his aptitude for drawing, his family first considered making him take up a career as an architect, like his two uncles.

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Training

In 1764, after learning drawing at the Académie de Saint-Luc, David was put in touch by his family with François Boucher, the king”s first painter, to be trained as a painter. Boucher being ill and too old to teach (he died in 1770), David felt that he could benefit more from learning the new pictorial tendencies that Joseph-Marie Vien, an artist whose antiquisite style was not yet free of gallant inspirations, could bring him.

In 1766, having entered Vien”s studio, but still influenced by Boucher”s aesthetics, David began to study art at the Royal Academy, whose teaching was intended to enable students to compete for the Prix de Rome. Jean Bardin was among the other teachers at the academy who taught him the principles of composition, anatomy and perspective, and his fellow students included Jean-Baptiste Regnault, François-André Vincent and François-Guillaume Ménageot.

Michel-Jean Sedaine, a close friend of the family, secretary of the Academy of Architecture and author of theater, becomes his protector and takes care of his intellectual education by making him meet some of the cultural personalities of the time. It was perhaps during these years of apprenticeship that he developed a tumor in his left cheek, following a sword fight with one of his fellow students.

In 1769, the third medal he received at the “Prix de quartier” opened the way to the Grand Prix de Rome competition.

In 1771, he won the second prize with his work Le Combat de Mars contre Minerve, in a style inherited from the Rococo and a composition judged weak by the jury of the academy; the winner was Joseph-Benoît Suvée.

In 1772, he missed again the first prize with Diane and Apollon piercing with their arrows the children of Niobe, the grand prize being awarded ex-æquo to Pierre-Charles Jombert and Gabriel Lemonnier, following a vote arranged by the jury. After this failure, which he experienced as an injustice, he decided to let himself die of hunger, but after two days, one of the jurors, Gabriel-François Doyen, convinced him to abandon his suicide attempt. In 1773, he failed again with La Mort de Sénèque, a subject inspired by Tacitus; the winner was Pierre Peyron, whose antique style was rewarded for its novelty, David”s composition being judged too theatrical. As a consolation, the Academy awarded him the prize for the Study of Heads and Expression for his pastel entitled La Douleur.

These successive failures have an impact on David”s opinion against the academic institution. In 1793, he used it as an argument when he passed the decree for the suppression of the academies.

At the end of 1773, Marie-Madeleine Guimard, first dancer at the Opera, asked David to take over the decoration of her private mansion, transformed into a private theater, which Fragonard had left unfinished following disagreements.

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Resident at the Academy in Rome

In 1774, he finally won the First Prize of Rome, which allowed him to stay for four years at the Palazzo Mancini, then the residence of the Académie de France in Rome. The work presented, Erasistrates discovering the cause of Antiochius” illness (Paris, École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts), conforms to the new canon of dramatic composition.

Around October 2, 1775, David accompanied his master Joseph-Marie Vien, who had just been appointed director of the French Academy in Rome, and two other laureates, the first prize in sculpture in 1774, Pierre Labussière, and Jean Bonvoisin, second prize in painting in 1775. During his trip, he was enthusiastic about the Italian Renaissance paintings that he saw in Parma, Bologna and Florence. During the first year of his stay in Rome, David followed his master”s advice by devoting himself essentially to the practice of drawing. He carefully studied the Antiques, making hundreds of sketches of monuments, statues and bas-reliefs. The whole of his studies compose five voluminous collections in-folio.

In 1776 he produced a large drawing, The Fighting of Diomedes (Vienna Graphische Sammlung Albertina), which represents one of his first attempts in the historical genre, an attempt he followed up two years later with The Funeral of Patroclus (Dublin, National Gallery of Ireland), a large-scale study painted in oil, intended for the commission of the Academy of Fine Arts, which was responsible for evaluating the submissions of the boarders in Rome. The commission encouraged David”s talent, but pointed out weaknesses in the rendering of space and deplored the general darkness of the scene, as well as the treatment of perspective. He also painted several pictures in a style borrowed from Caravaggio: two academies of men, one entitled Hector (1778) and the second called Patroclus (1780), inspired by the marble Galate dying in the Capitoline Museum, a Saint Jerome, a Head of a Philosopher and a copy of the Last Supper by Valentin de Boulogne.

From July to August 1779, David went to Naples with the sculptor François Marie Suzanne. During this stay, he visited the ruins of Herculaneum and Pompeii. He attributed to this trip the origin of his conversion to the new style inspired by Antiquity; he wrote in 1808: “It seemed to me that I had just had a cataract operation. I understood that I could not improve my way of painting, the principle of which was false, and that it was necessary to divorce myself from all that I had believed at first to be beautiful and true. The biographer Miette de Villars suggests that the influence of the antiquarian Antoine Quatremère de Quincy, a follower of the ideas of Winckelmann and Lessing, whom David, according to him, met in Naples, was not unrelated to this, but no contemporary source confirms a meeting between the two men at this time.

After this trip, he was subject to a deep crisis of depression that lasted two months, the cause of which is not clearly defined. According to the correspondence of the painter at that time, it was due to a relationship with the maid of Madame Vien, associated with a period of doubt after the discovery of the remains of Naples. To get him out of this melancholy crisis, his master commissioned him to paint a religious picture commemorating the plague epidemic that occurred in Marseilles in 1720, Saint Roch interceding with the Virgin for the healing of the plague victims, destined for the chapel of the Lazaret in Marseilles (Musée des beaux-arts de Marseille). Even if some resurgence of Caravaggio”s style is discernible, the work bears witness to a new way of painting by David, and is directly inspired by the style of Nicolas Poussin, by taking up the diagonal composition of the Apparition of the Virgin to Saint James the Greater (1629, Musée du Louvre). Completed in 1780, the painting was displayed in a room in the Mancini Palace and made a strong impression on Roman visitors. During its exhibition in Paris in 1781, the philosopher Diderot was impressed by the expression of the plague-stricken man at the foot of Saint Roch.

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Accreditation by the Academy

Pompeo Batoni, the dean of Italian painters and one of the precursors of neo-classicism, tried unsuccessfully to convince him to stay in Rome, but David left the Eternal City on July 17, 1780, taking with him three works, the Saint Roch, and two unfinished canvases, Belisarius Begging for Alms and the Portrait of Count Stanislas Potocki. Stanislas Potocki was a Polish gentleman and aesthete who translated Winckelmann; the painter had met him in Rome and he represents him inspired by the equestrian portraits of Antoon Van Dyck.

He arrived in Paris at the end of the year and completed his Belisarius (Lille, Musée des Beaux-Arts), a large painting intended for the approval of the artist by the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture, the only way for artists of the time to obtain the right to exhibit at the Salon of the Academy, following the decision of the Count d”Angiviller, Director General of the King”s Buildings, to limit the access to the Salon to only those artists who had been recognized as such by the academy, and to forbid other public exhibitions.

It was after seeing the painting on the same subject painted for Cardinal de Bernis by Pierre Peyron, a former competitor for the Prix de Rome, that David decided to create a painting on the fallen Byzantine general. Both were inspired by the novel by Marmontel. The work testifies to his new pictorial orientation and his affirmation of the neo-classical style. Received unanimously, he could present his three paintings as well as his large study of Patroclus” Funeral at the Salon of 1781, where they were noticed by the critics, in particular by Diderot who, paraphrasing Jean Racine in Bérénice, confessed his fascination for Belisarius: “Every day I see him and always think I see him for the first time”.

In 1782 he married Marguerite Charlotte Pécoul, seventeen years younger than himself. His father-in-law, Charles-Pierre Pécoul, was a contractor for the King”s buildings, and endowed his daughter with an annuity of 50,000 livres, providing David with the financial means to set up his studio in the Louvre, where he also had an apartment. She gave him four children, the eldest of whom, Charles-Louis Jules David (nds), was born the following year.

He opens his studio, where he receives applications from young artists wishing to learn under his teaching. Fabre, Wicar, Girodet, Drouais, Debret are among the first students of David.

After the approval, David painted in 1783 his “Morceau de réception”, La Douleur d”Andromaque (Musée du Louvre), a subject he chose after an episode of the Iliad and whose motif was inspired by the decoration of an ancient sarcophagus, La Mort de Méléagre, which he had copied from his notebooks in Rome. With this work, David was received as a member of the Academy on August 23, 1783, and, after the confirmation, he took the oath in the hands of Jean-Baptiste Pierre, on September 6.

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Leader of the new school of painting

Since 1781, David had been thinking of doing a large-scale history painting inspired by the theme of the battle of the Horatii and Curiatii, and indirectly by Pierre Corneille”s play Horace, in response to a commission from the Bâtiments du Roi. But it was three years later that he completed this project by choosing an episode absent from the play, The Oath of the Horatii (1785, Musée du Louvre), which he may have taken from Charles Rollin”s Roman History, or was inspired by a painting by the British painter Gavin Hamilton, The Oath of Brutus. Thanks to financial assistance from his father-in-law, David left for Rome in October 1784, accompanied by his wife and one of his students and assistant Jean-Germain Drouais, who was competing for the Grand Prix de Peinture. In the Palazzo Costanzi, he continued the realization of his painting, which he had begun in Paris.

David did not stick to the ten-by-ten foot (3.30 by 3.30 m) size imposed by the King”s Buildings, but enlarged the painting, giving it a width of thirteen-by-ten feet (4.25 by 3.30 m). His disobedience of official instructions earned him a reputation as a rebellious and independent artist. He took the initiative of exhibiting his painting in Rome, before the official presentation at the Salon, where it had a great impact in the milieu of artists and archaeologists.

Despite his success in Rome, and the support of the Marquis de Bièvre, he had to make do with a poor placement for his painting at the Salon of 1785, which he blamed on his poor relations with Jean-Baptiste Pierre, the king”s first painter and director of the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture, but which was in fact due to the delay in sending the work to Paris after the Salon had opened. This did not prevent The Oath of the Horatii from being a great public and critical success, and from being considered the leader of the new school of painting, which was not yet called neo-classicism.

David”s success as an established artist recognized by his peers, as a portraitist of the high society of his time and as a teacher, however, exposed him to the jealousies of the Academy. The 1786 competition for the Prix de Rome was cancelled, because the candidates were all students of his studio, and his candidacy for the post of director of the Académie de France in Rome was rejected.

That same year, in the absence of an official commission from the king, he fulfilled that of Charles Michel Trudaine de la Sablière, a liberal aristocrat, lord of Plessis-Franc and a member of the Paris parliament, by painting The Death of Socrates (1787, New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art), a half-figure painting (1.29 meters by 1.96 meters). The gesture of the hand directed toward the cup was suggested to the painter, according to the biographer P. A. Coupin, by his friend the poet André Chénier:

“Originally, David had painted Socrates already holding the cup presented to him by the executioner. – No! no! – said André Chénier, who also died a victim of the injustice of men; – Socrates, entirely devoted to the great thoughts he expresses, must stretch out his hand towards the cup; but he will not seize it until he has finished speaking.

Exhibited at the Salon of 1787, the work competes with Peyron”s version of the same scene, which was commissioned by the King”s Buildings. In fact, by consciously choosing the same subject, David once again confronted his former rival for the Prix de Rome of 1773 and took his revenge by the success he met during his exhibition.

In 1788 he painted Les Amours de Pâris et d”Hélène (1788, Musée du Louvre) for the Count of Artois, the future Charles X, which he had begun two years earlier. This is the only commission directly from a member of the royal family; the one for a portrait of Louis XVI showing the Constitution to the Dauphin, which the king asked him to do in 1792, was never completed. The year 1788 was troubled by the early death of his favorite pupil Jean-Germain Drouais from smallpox. On hearing this news, the painter wrote: “I have lost my emulation”.

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Revolutionary period

In 1788, David painted the Portrait of Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier and his wife. The chemist Antoine Lavoisier, who was also a farmer-general and the administrator of the “régie des Poudres et salpêtres” at the time, provoked a riot in the Paris arsenal in August 1789 for storing gunpowder. Following this incident, the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture deemed it prudent not to exhibit the painting at the 1789 Salon.

This is also what almost happened for the painting The lictors bring to Brutus the bodies of his sons. D”Angiviller, fearing a comparison between the intransigence of the consul Lucius Junius Brutus sacrificing his sons who were conspiring against the Roman Republic and the weakness of Louis XVI in the face of the actions of the Count d”Artois against the Third Estate, ordered that it not be exhibited, even though it was a commission from the King”s Buildings. The newspapers of the time seized on the affair, seeing in it a censorship of the authorities. Shortly after this press campaign, the painting was exhibited at the Salon, but the painter agreed to remove the severed heads of the sons of Brutus planted on pikes, which were originally on the canvas. Brutus became very popular with the public, even influencing fashion and furniture. Hairstyles “à la Brutus” were adopted, women abandoned powdered wigs, and the cabinetmaker Jacob made “Roman” furniture designed by David.

Since 1786, David has been frequenting the milieu of liberal aristocrats. Through the Trudaine brothers, he met Chénier, Bailly and Condorcet, among others; at Madame de Genlis” salon, he met Barère, Barnave and Alexandre de Lameth, future protagonists of the Revolution. Two former students from Nantes whom he had met in Rome, the architect Mathurin Crucy and the sculptor Jacques Lamarie, suggested that he create an allegory to celebrate the pre-Revolutionary events that took place in Nantes at the end of 1788. In September 1789, David, along with Jean-Bernard Restout, led the “Dissident Academicians”, a group founded to reform the institution of Fine Arts. He demanded the end of the privileges of the Academy, and in particular the right for non-approved artists to exhibit at the Salon.

In 1790, he undertook to commemorate the Oath of the Palm Game. This project, inspired to David by Dubois-Crancé and Barère, was the painter”s most ambitious achievement. The work, which, when completed, was to be David”s largest painting (ten meters wide and seven meters high, slightly larger than the Rite of Spring), represents the 630 deputies present at the event. The project was first proposed, by its first secretary Dubois-Crancé, to the Société des amis de la Constitution, the first name of the Jacobin Club, to which David had just joined. A subscription for the sale of an engraving after the painting to finance the project is launched, but it does not allow to gather the necessary funds for the completion of the painting.

In 1791, Barère proposed to the Constituent Assembly to take over the financing of the Oath, but, despite the success of the exhibition of the drawing at the Salon of 1791, the painting was never completed, David abandoning the project for good in 1801. According to his biographers, there were many reasons for this, firstly financial: the subscription was a failure, the sum of 6 624 livres was raised instead of the 72 000 livres planned; secondly, for political reasons: the evolution of events meant that among the characters in the main group, Barnave, Bailly and Mirabeau (who died in April 1791) were discredited by the patriots for their moderatism and their closeness to Louis XVI; and thirdly, for aesthetic reasons, as David was not satisfied with the representation of modern costumes in an antique style.

While pursuing his artistic activity, he entered politics, taking the lead in 1790 of the “Commune des Arts”, which was born out of the movement of the “dissident academicians”. In 1790, he obtained the end of the control of the Salon by the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture and participated as assistant curator in the first “Salon de la liberté”, which opened on August 21, 1791. In September 1790, he lobbied the Assembly for the abolition of all academies. The decision was ratified by a decree supported by the painter and the abbot Grégoire, only on August 8, 1793; in the meantime, he also had the position of director of the French Academy in Rome abolished.

On July 11, 1791, the transfer of Voltaire”s ashes to the Pantheon took place; doubts remain as to David”s role in its organization. He seems in fact to have been only an adviser and not to have taken an active part in the ceremony.

Painter and conventional

In August 1790, Charlotte David, who disagreed with her husband”s opinions, decided to separate from him and to retire for a while to a convent. On July 17, 1791, David was one of the signatories of the petition asking for the deposition of Louis XVI, gathered at the Champ de Mars just before the shooting; on this occasion he met the future Minister of the Interior, Roland. In September of the same year, he tried unsuccessfully to be elected as a deputy to the Legislative Assembly. His artistic activity became less present: if he found time to make his second self-portrait called Self-portrait with three collars (1791, Florence, Uffizi Gallery), he left several portraits unfinished, among which those of Madame Pastoret and Madame Trudaine.

In 1792, his political positions became more radical: on April 15, he organized his first revolutionary celebration in honor of the Swiss regiment of Chateauvieux, who had mutinied in their garrison in Nancy. His support of this cause provoked a definitive break with his former liberal relations, notably André Chénier and Madame de Genlis.

On September 17, 1792, he was elected 20th deputy of Paris to the National Convention, with 450 votes in the second degree elections, and the support of Jean-Paul Marat who classified him among the “excellent patriots”. As a people”s representative in the section of the museum, he sat with the party of the Montagne.

Shortly after October 13, he was appointed to the Committee of Public Instruction and, as such, was in charge of the organization of civic and revolutionary celebrations, as well as of propaganda. At the Committee, from 1792 to 1794, he was in charge of the administration of arts, which was added to his fight against the Academy. Also a member of the Commission of Monuments, he proposed the establishment of an inventory of all national treasures and played an active role in the reorganization of the Museum of Arts. At the beginning of 1794, he conceived a program for the embellishment of Paris and had Guillaume Coustou”s Marly horses installed at the entrance of the Champs-Élysées.

From January 16 to 19, 1793 (27 to 30 nivôse year I), he voted for the death of King Louis XVI, which provoked the divorce proceedings initiated by his wife. On January 20, the Conventional Louis-Michel Lepeletier de Saint-Fargeau was assassinated for having voted for the death of the king. David is charged by Barère with the funeral ceremony and has the body exposed on the Place des Piques. He then depicts the deputy on his deathbed in a painting Les Derniers Moments de Michel Lepeletier, exhibited at the Convention. This work, which was later recovered by the painter in 1795, was probably destroyed in 1826 by Suzanne Lepeletier de Mortefontaine, the daughter of the murdered Conventional. It remains known by a drawing of his pupil Anatole Devosge, and an engraving by Pierre Alexandre Tardieu.

When the assassination of Marat was announced on July 13, 1793, the Convention, through the voice of the orator François Élie Guirault, spokesman of the Section of the Social Contract, ordered David to do for Marat what he had done for Lepeletier. A close relation of the Conventional, David had been among the last deputies to see him alive, the day before the assassination. He painted, with Marat assassinated (1793), one of his most famous and emblematic paintings of his revolutionary period, exposing the assassination in its crudity. He also took care of the funeral by organizing a quasi-religious ceremony in the Cordeliers church on July 16, preceded by a funeral procession. In October 1793, David announced the completion of his painting. From November 1793 to February 1795, the paintings of Lepeletier and Marat will sit in the session room of the Convention.

With The Death of Young Bara David painted his third and last picture on the theme of revolutionary martyrdom, this time taking as an example the case of Joseph Bara, a young drummer in the Republican army, killed at the age of 14 by Vendeans in Jallais, north of Cholet, on December 7, 1793. Following a letter sent to the Convention by his leader, Jean-Baptiste Desmarres, describing this death and demanding a pension for Bara”s mother, he was made a hero and martyr of the Revolution. David was also in charge of a revolutionary celebration for his and Viala”s pantheonization, but the events of the 9th of Thermidor, date of the fall of Robespierre, made the project be abandoned.

David had also considered celebrating the general Marquis de Dampierre, for whom he made some preparatory sketches for a painting that would not be realized; the project was perhaps interrupted by the announcement of Marat”s assassination.

From the second half of 1793, David held several positions of political responsibility. In June, he was appointed president of the Jacobin Club; the following month, he was secretary of the Convention. He took an active part in the politics of the Terror by becoming on September 14, 1793 a member of the Committee of General Safety and president of the interrogation section. In this capacity, he countersigned about three hundred arrest warrants, and about fifty orders bringing suspects before the revolutionary court. He chaired the committee during the impeachment of Fabre d”Églantine, and co-signed the arrest of General Alexandre de Beauharnais, and during the trial of Marie-Antoinette, he participated as a witness in the interrogation of the Dauphin, and made a famous drawing of the deposed queen as she was led to the scaffold. He did not prevent the execution of former friends or sponsors such as the Trudaine brothers, Lavoisier, the Duchess of Noailles, for whom he had painted a Christ on the Cross, or André Chénier. Carle Vernet blamed him for the execution of his sister Marguerite Émilie Vernet who had married the architect Chalgrin. However, he protected Dominique Vivant Denon by having him removed from the list of emigrants and by giving him a position as an engraver, supported the nomination of Jean-Honoré Fragonard to the conservatory of the Museum of Arts, and helped his pupil Antoine Jean Gros, whose royalist opinions could have made him a suspect, by giving him the means to go to Italy. In 1794, David was appointed president of the Convention, a position he held from January 5 to 21 (16 nivôse to 2 pluviôse year II).

As the organizer of the revolutionary celebrations and ceremonies, he conceived with the help of the architect Hubert, the carpenter Duplay (who was also Robespierre”s landlord), the poet Marie-Joseph Chénier, André Chénier”s brother, and the composer Méhul, the celebration of the reunion of August 10, the translation of Marat”s ashes to the Pantheon (which will be organized only after the fall of Robespierre), the celebration of the recapture of Toulon, and the following year, on June 8, he organized the ceremony of the Supreme Being for which he designed the floats of the procession and the elements of the ceremony. Influenced by the English “prince of caricature” James Gillray, he also drew propaganda caricatures for the Committee of Public Safety, and designed the costumes for the representatives of the people, the judges, or even the ordinary citizens, who were invited by the revolutionary authorities to wear a republican outfit. He is also credited with having designed the national flag of the navy in 1794, which later became the French tricolor flag, and with having chosen the order of the colors (blue at the flagstaff, white and red floating in the wind).

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During the Directory

On the 8th of Thermidor II (July 26, 1794), Robespierre was challenged by the deputies of the Convention for refusing to appoint the members of the committees that he accused of conspiracy. During this session, David publicly declares his support to the incorruptible when this one pronounces as defense the sentence “if it is necessary to succumb, well! my friends, you will see me drinking the hemlock with calm”, by answering him “I will drink it with you”. The 9 thermidor, day of the fall of Robespierre, David is absent from the convention for reasons of health according to his own statements; being sick, he had taken an emetic. But Barère, in his memoirs, states that he had warned him not to go to the assembly: “do not come, you are not a politician”. By his absence, he thus escaped the first wave of arrests that led to the fall of Robespierre”s supporters.

On 13 Thermidor, at the Convention, David was summoned by André Dumont, Goupilleau and Lecointre to explain his support for Robespierre and his absence from the session of 9 Thermidor. According to Delécluze”s testimony, he awkwardly tried to defend himself and to deny his Robespierrist past. During this session, he was excluded from the Committee of General Safety, which marked the end of his political activities. He was indicted on the 15th of the same month along with Joseph Le Bon, and his arrest triggered the reaction against the terrorists. David was imprisoned in the old hotel of the General Farms, then, on the 10th of Fribourg, he was transferred to Luxembourg, but he was allowed to have his painting material during his incarceration. On the 29th of Frimaire (November 30, 1794) his students mobilized and, with the support of Boissy d”Anglas, petitioned for his release. In the meantime, Charlotte Pécoul, although divorced, learns of his arrest and returns to her former husband; the remarriage is pronounced on November 12, 1796. On December 10, after the three committees (salut public, sûreté générale and instruction publique) had examined the indictments of Lecointre against David, Barère, Billaud-Varenne, Vadier and Collot d”Herbois and found them insufficient, the case was dismissed and the painter was released.

David retired to the suburbs of Paris, to the Saint-Ouen farm (Favières, Seine-et-Marne), in the house of his brother-in-law Charles Sériziat. But following the riots of Prairial, and a new indictment from the Section of the Museum, he was arrested again, and imprisoned, on May 29, 1795, at the Collège des Quatre-Nations (his former school, now a prison). At the request of Charlotte David, he was transferred and put under surveillance in Saint-Ouen, before benefiting on 4 brumaire year IV (October 26, 1795) from the political amnesty of the facts relative to the Revolution, which marks the separation of the Convention.

During his imprisonment, David painted the Self-portrait of the Louvre (1794), and returned to classical history painting by conceiving the project of a Homer reciting his verses to the Greeks, which did not come to fruition and is known only by a pencil and wash drawing (he also made a first sketch inspired by the theme of the Sabines, and painted a landscape from the window of his cell in Luxembourg, which art historians think with reservations is the one exhibited in the Louvre. During his second imprisonment, he painted portraits of conventioneers who were, like him, imprisoned, notably that of Jeanbon Saint-André (1795, Chicago, Art Institute of Chicago). Shortly after his amnesty, he accepted to be a member of the Institute, newly created by the Directory, in the painting section of the Literature and Fine Arts Class. In October 1795, he returned to the Salon, where he had not exhibited since 1791, with two portraits of members of the Sériziat family, painted during his stays in Saint-Ouen in the family residence. That same year he painted portraits of Gaspar Mayer and Jacobus Blauw (nl), the two diplomats responsible for the recognition of the young Dutch Republic by France.

But his activity under the Directory will be mainly occupied by the realization of the Sabines, which he painted from 1795 to 1798, and in which are symbolized the virtues of concord. Claiming a return to the “pure Greek”, David made his style evolve by the choice considered at the time as bold to represent the main heroes naked, which he justified in a note accompanying the exhibition of the work Notes on the nudity of my heroes. This example was followed and radicalized by a faction of his students who formed around Pierre-Maurice Quay under the name of the “Barbus”, or “group of primitives”, who advocated an even more extreme return to the Greek model, to the point of dissenting and opposing their master, blaming him for the insufficiently archaic character of the painting. David eventually dismissed the leaders of the group, Pierre-Maurice Quay and Jean-Pierre Franque, his assistant for The Sabines, whom he replaced with Jérôme-Martin Langlois. Another pupil collaborated in its realization, Jean-Auguste Dominique Ingres, who had recently joined the studio in 1797.

The presentation of the Sabines was an opportunity for David to innovate. Refusing to participate in the Salon de peinture, and inspired by the example of the American painters Benjamin West and John Singleton Copley, he organized a paying exhibition of the work in the former room of the Academy of Architecture, on loan from the Louvre administration. He installed a mirror in front of the painting so that visitors could believe they were part of the work. Because of the repercussion due to the nudity of the characters and the rumor that the sisters of Bellegarde, famous in the society of the Directory, posed as models, and the controversy related to its paid nature, the exhibition, which ran until 1805, was a great success, attracting nearly 50,000 visitors and bringing in 66,627 francs, which allowed David to buy in 1801 a former priory that had become a 140-hectare property, the Marcoussis farm, in Ozouer-le-Voulgis in the department of Seine et Marne.

David painter of Bonaparte

David”s admiration for Bonaparte originated with the announcement of the victory at Lodi on May 10, 1796. The artist planned to paint a picture of the capture of the bridge of Lodi and sent a letter to the general asking for a drawing of the site. A year later, during the coup d”état of 18 fructidor year V, warned of the attacks on David by the royalist party, Bonaparte sent his aide-de-camp to propose to the painter to come under his protection in his camp in Milan, but David declined the invitation, having to devote himself to his painting of the Sabines. It was at the end of 1797, on Bonaparte”s triumphant return after the signing of the Treaty of Campo-Formio, that the two men met at a reception given by the Directory; on this occasion, David proposed to Bonaparte to paint his portrait, which remained unfinished (1798, Louvre). After the only posing session Bonaparte accepted, the artist expressed his enthusiasm for the man he called “his hero” to his students.

After the coup d”état of Brumaire, which he welcomed with fatality: “I had always thought well that we were not virtuous enough to be republicans,” David undertook a new project of a large history painting, with the subject of the resistance of Leonidas” Spartans at the passage of Thermopylae, which he began in 1800, but did not complete until fourteen years later; similarly, as a result of dissatisfaction and perhaps the impatience of the model, he did not finish the portrait of Madame Recamier.

In August 1800, the Spanish king Charles IV, in the context of the consolidation of diplomatic relations and cooperation with the new power linked to the recent victories of Napoleon Bonaparte, commissioned, through the ambassador Charles-Jean-Marie Alquier, the former regicide David to paint a portrait of the First Consul for his royal palace. He painted Bonaparte crossing the Great St. Bernard, which was followed by three replicas executed at the request of the model, making this work the first official portrait of the First Consul, which would be widely distributed by engraving, helping to make it one of the most famous portraits of Napoleon. David decided to present the first two versions of the equestrian portrait as part of the paying exhibition of the Sabines, which caused an uproar in the press, which criticized the painter for not having exhibited them at the Salon, which was free, even though the two paintings had been paid for by their sponsors. This earned David a reputation for greed, aggravated by the affair of the engraving of the Oath of the Palm Game, whose subscribers, encouraged by Lecointre, demanded reimbursement. David will publish a letter of justification in several newspapers.

During the Consulate, David was asked by the government to act as an artistic advisor; he designed a costume for the members of the government, which was not accepted, participated in the decoration of the Tuileries, and was asked to reflect on the project of national and departmental columns. He also prepared a project for the reform of artistic institutions, for which he considered becoming an arts administrator, which was refused by the Minister of the Interior Lucien Bonaparte. The latter proposed him instead to become “Painter of the government”, but the artist refused, according to Delécluze, by spite of not having been able to reach higher functions. He also refused to become a member of the Société libre des arts du dessin, created by the minister Chaptal.

Indirectly involved in the conspiracy of the daggers, an assassination attempt against Bonaparte that was to take place in October 1800 at the Opera of the rue de Richelieu, notably for having let distribute in his studio tickets of the representation of the Horaces (lyric play of Bernardo Porta inspired by his painting The Oath of the Horaces), to members of the conspiracy, David had to explain during the trial his relations with two of the conspirators, his former pupil François Topino-Lebrun, a former Babouvist supporter, and the Roman sculptor Giuseppe Ceracchi. His testimony in defense of the conspirators did not prevent their execution in January 1801, shortly after the attack on the rue Saint-Nicaise, and awakened the Jacobin past of the painter who saw his studio put under surveillance by the police of Fouché.

Several British travelers took advantage of the peace of Amiens to travel to France, to visit the Louvre, among other places, and to meet David, who was considered by John Carr, one of these travelers, as the greatest living French artist. It was in these circumstances that the Irish Quaker entrepreneur, Cooper Penrose, asked the painter for his portrait. The commission was accepted for the sum of 200 gold louis (1802, San Diego, California, Timken Museum of Art).

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The “First Painter” of the Emperor

On December 18, 1803, David was named Knight of the Legion of Honor and was decorated on July 16 of the following year. In October 1804, David was commissioned by Bonaparte, who had become emperor under the name of Napoleon I, to paint four ceremonial pictures: The Coronation, The Distribution of the Eagles, The Enthronement and The Arrival at the Town Hall. Shortly after the ceremony, he invested him with the function of “First Painter”, but without the same attributions linked to this title as Charles Le Brun had with Louis XIV. In fact, since 1802, the administration of the arts was entrusted to the sole charge of Dominique Vivant Denon.

He had a box at Notre-Dame from which he could follow the episodes and details of the coronation ceremony. He made sketches and completed The Coronation of Napoleon in three years. He himself recounted how he operated:

“I drew the whole from life, and I made all the main groups separately. I made notes for what I did not have time to draw, so one can believe, by seeing the painting, to have attended the ceremony. Each one occupies the place which is appropriate to him, he is dressed with the clothes of his dignity. One hastened to come to be painted in this painting, which contains more than two hundred figures… “

David, who, like the other resident artists, had just been expelled from the Louvre where he had two studios, had the former church of Cluny at his disposal for the needs of the realization of the painting, whose important dimensions (9.80 meters by 6.21 meters) required a large room.

Although David alone conceived the composition of the work, which was originally intended to show the emperor crowning himself, but which was replaced by the coronation of Josephine de Beauharnais at the suggestion of his former pupil François Gérard, Napoleon made other changes to it, the most notable of which was the addition of the emperor”s mother Letizia Bonaparte, who, in reality, had not attended the ceremony. He also makes Pope Pius VII make a gesture of blessing, whereas David had made him take a passive attitude: “I did not make him come so far, so that he would not do anything”. David took advantage of the pontiff”s visit to paint his portrait (1805, Paris, Louvre Museum), which displeased Napoleon. In the same way, the latter refused an imperial portrait intended for the city of Genoa which he judged: “… so bad, so full of defects, that I do not accept it and do not want to send it to any city, especially in Italy, where it would give a very bad idea of our school.

The exhibition of The Rite was the highlight of the Salon of 1808; Napoleon, seeing the finished work, expressed his satisfaction and promoted the artist, who was made an officer of the Legion of Honor.

In the painting The Distribution of Eagles, David had to make two important changes on the orders of the emperor: he emptied the sky of the “Victory that rains laurel on the heads of the flags” and, after 1809, he made Josephine repudiated disappear from the scene, the first change rendering irrelevant the movement of the heads of the marshals, who are now looking at the empty space where the allegory had been.

From 1810 onwards, relations between David and the government became more distant, mainly because of difficulties in paying for the paintings of The Rite of Paris and The Distribution of the Eagles, which was his last work for Napoleon. The government, through the intermediary of the administration of arts, contested the financial claims of the painter, judged exorbitant. Moreover, he was excluded from the commission for the reorganization of the School of Fine Arts. The last portrait he painted of the emperor, Napoleon in his study, was a private commission from a Scottish politician and collector, Alexander, Marquis of Douglas and Clydesdale, the future tenth Duke of Hamilton.

In the same year, the Institute organized the Prix décennaux competition, which distinguished works considered outstanding for the decade 1800-1810. The Rite was awarded the prize for the best national painting, but David considered it an affront to see the Sabines ranked second behind Girodet”s Flood Scene, awarded the best history painting of the decade.

Towards the end of the Empire, David resumed private commissions, including a mythological scene, Sapho, Phaon and Love, destined for the prince and collector Nicolas Youssoupov, in which the painter returned to a gallant antiquity already treated with Les Amours de Pâris et d”Hélène. In May 1814, he completed Leonidas at Thermopylae, begun fourteen years earlier, inspired by Greek antiquity, and in which he reinforced the aesthetic of the return to pure Greek that he had advocated fifteen years earlier with the Sabines, and which constitutes its counterpart. Conceived as early as 1800, the subject of the painting takes on a particular significance in 1814, the year of Napoleon”s first abdication after the French campaign.

During the Hundred Days, David was reinstated in his rank of First Painter, from which he had been stripped during the first Restoration, and was elevated to the dignity of Commander of the Legion of Honor. In May 1815, David remained faithful to the imperial regime by signing the Additional Acts to the Constitutions of the Empire, of liberal inspiration.

Exile and death in Brussels

If his former students Antoine-Jean Gros, François Gérard and Girodet, rallied to the monarchy, David, sensing reprisals due to his revolutionary past and his support to Napoleon, decided, after Waterloo, to put his paintings of the Sabines, the Rite of the Sacred Heart, the Distribution of the Eagles and Leonidas in safety and to take refuge in Switzerland; he returned to France in August 1815. Despite the proposal of the Minister of Police, Élie Decazes, to exempt him from the law of January 12, 1816, which excluded from the amnesty and proscribed from the kingdom the regicides who had signed the Additional Act, the painter decided to submit to it, and after having entrusted the management of his studio to Antoine Gros, he left France for good. Two months later, his name was struck from the register of the Academy of Fine Arts.

At first, he asked for asylum in Rome, which was refused. He then chose Belgium, which welcomed him on January 27, 1816, and he met again in Brussels other former regicide conventionals: Barère, who had suggested the project of the Oath of the Jeu de Paume, Alquier, who had been at the origin of the commission of the equestrian portrait of Bonaparte, and Sieyès, whose portrait he made. He also reunited with several former Belgian students, Navez, Odevaere, Paelinck and Stapleaux, who assisted him in the creation of several paintings.

Refusing the numerous interventions of Gros and his students, who petitioned for his return to France, and the offers of pardon from King Louis XVIII, as well as the proposal of King Frederick William III of Prussia, who wished to make David his minister of arts, he chose to remain in Belgium.

He became a privileged spectator of La Monnaie in Brussels, and was enthusiastic about the works of the Dutch and Flemish masters, which he saw in Brussels, and which made his style evolve by reviving his palette. At this time he painted a large number of portraits of exiles and Belgian notables, and several paintings inspired by mythology. He painted the portraits of Joseph Bonaparte”s daughters who were visiting Brussels with their mother, and for whom he also gave drawing lessons to one of the daughters, Charlotte Bonaparte. He painted two pictures inspired by the Iliad and the Odyssey, The Wrath of Achilles (1819) and The Farewells of Telemachus and Eucharis (1822), which originated in Fénelon”s text The Adventures of Telemachus, as well as Love and Psyche (1817, Cleveland Museum of Art) for Count Sommariva, which, when exhibited in Brussels, shocked visitors with its realistic treatment of Cupid, painted directly from a model and far from the ancient idealism of which the painter was accustomed. In 1822, assisted by Georges Rouget, he painted a copy of the Rite of Corpus Christi for American clients (1822, Musée national du château de Versailles et de Trianon).

At the age of 75, he executed Mars Disarmed by Venus and the Graces (1824, Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium), a painting of more than three meters high which is his last great historical painting. He organized an exhibition of the painting in Paris, which attracted 9,500 visitors. On the occasion of this exhibition, the second biography of the painter, Notice sur la vie et les ouvrages de M. J.-L. David, was published.

From 1820 onwards, David experienced several health problems which were aggravated when, in 1824, on his way back from La Monnaie, he was knocked down by a carriage, which caused an oedema. In November 1825, he was paralyzed in his hands due to a cerebral congestion and could no longer paint. On his return from the theater, he caught a cold. Shortly before his death, he had time to give Stapleaux indications for the engraving of Leonidas and died in his bed on December 29, 1825, at number 7 of the rue Léopold, located behind La Monnaie.

His body lay in the church of Sainte-Gudule, awaiting a response from the French government to his family”s request to have his remains returned to France. On October 11, 1826, after the French government refused his repatriation, he was first buried in the cemetery of the Leopold district in Saint-Josse-ten-Noode; only the painter”s heart rests in Paris in the Père-Lachaise cemetery, next to his wife Charlotte David, who died shortly after him, on May 26, 1826. In 1882 David”s remains were transferred to the Brussels cemetery in Evere.

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David”s tumor

David is often identified by his contemporaries by the tumor on his left cheek which deformed his face, and which swelled with time. This earned him the nickname of “Grosse-Joue” or “the fat cheek” by the royalist press during the Directoire. In his self-portraits he hid this physical defect with a shadow, but other artists such as Jérôme-Martin Langlois in the last portrait of the painter made during his lifetime and François Rude show without complacency the deformation caused by the cyst.

According to the biographies, the origin of this tumor is consecutive to a wound in the mouth due to a sword fight or a fencing exercise which would have taken place in the workshop of his master Vien. Apart from the deformation of the cheek, this tumor also had consequences on his speech, preventing him from expressing himself normally, a difficulty added to a grassey in the pronunciation which made it difficult for him to read speeches in public. J. Wilhelm attributed this deformation to an exostosis of the parotid gland, or according to Hautecœur to “a mixed tumor of the parotid gland with slow evolution”.

An article in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, “Jacques-Louis David and his post-traumatic facial pathology,” states that the deep wound around the left upper lip caused facial asymmetry and partial paralysis making chewing and speaking difficult and taxing. He also notes in the 1794 self-portrait a scar crossing the cheek under the left orbit which may justify the presence of a granuloma or neuroma resulting from facial nerve trauma.

Income and wealth

David owes the launch of his career in part to the large dowry his father-in-law provided for his daughter Charlotte for her marriage, which allowed him to set up his studio in the Louvre, and to organize the Horatii exhibition in Rome. He sold his paintings at high prices for the time, the Oath of the Horatii brought him 6,000 livres, the Bonaparte au Grand-Saint-Bernard was paid 25,000 livres tournament by the Spanish Crown. As another source of income, his students paid him twelve pounds a month for his teaching, which, according to Antoine Schnapper”s calculations, made him 4 to 5,000 pounds a year. He initiated in France the practice of paying exhibitions for his Sabines, whose presentation during five years in a room of the Louvre allowed him to constitute a fortune of 66 627 francs. The other paying exhibition he organized for Mars Disarmed by Venus in 1824 attracted 9,538 people who paid two francs for the visit. During the Empire he received a salary of 12,000 francs per year as “Premier peintre”. Another important source of income was the “engraving rights” that he received from the reproduction of his paintings. Pierre Rosenberg indicates that “the David”s were almost millionaires”.

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Membership in Freemasonry

The theme of the oath found in several works such as The Oath of the Palm Game, The Distribution of Eagles, Leonidas at Thermopylae, was perhaps inspired to David by the rituals of Freemasonry. Following the art historian Jacques Brengues, Luc de Nanteuil and Philippe Bordes (with reservations, reproaching Brengues for the lack of evidence), have suggested that the painter was a Freemason. In 1989, during the colloquium David contre David, Albert Boime was able to attest, on the basis of a document dated 1787, to the painter”s membership in the Masonic lodge of the Moderation as an affiliated member.

Marriage and descent

Jacques-Louis David married Marguerite Charlotte Pecoul in 1782, and posterity :

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Genres and themes in David”s paintings

His academic training and his artistic career made David a painter of history, a genre considered since the 17th century, according to the classification of Félibien, as “the great genre”. Until his exile, the works to which he gave the most importance were historical compositions inspired by subjects taken from mythology (Andromache, Mars disarmed by Venus) or the history of Roman and Greek antiquity (Brutus, The Sabines, Leonidas). From the Revolution onwards, he tried to adapt his antique inspiration to the subjects of his time by painting works with contemporary subjects. The most characteristic works are The Oath of the Palm Game, The Death of Marat and The Rite of Paris.

Élie Faure defines the style of the history painter as follows: “In his history scenes, everything that is an actual thing, an accessory impossible to modify in the matter, is painted with the densest and most opaque brilliance”. Faure compares his precision, his attention to detail to the art of the storyteller “… by some flowery figure of a cantor, by some obese belly of a canon, which one must patiently search for in the least visible corner of such a solemn canvas, but which La Fontaine would find and which Courbet did not fail to see.”

The portrait is the other pictorial genre that makes his painting recognized. From the beginning of his career until his exile in Belgium, he painted portraits of his close friends and acquaintances as well as of the notables of his entourage; his attempts at official portraiture were his equestrian portraits of Napoleon and his portraits of Pope Pius VII in coronation costume, as well as his portraits of some members of the regime, such as Estève and Français de Nantes. His style in this genre prefigures the portraits of Ingres. He is also known for three self-portraits. The rediscovery of David at the end of the 19th century is mainly due to the exhibition of his portraits.

David”s portraits are characterized by his way of showing the figure in the choice of simple poses, often represented in bust and seated (Alphonse Leroy, Countess Daru, Sieyès), more rarely in full-length (portraits of the husband and wife Lavoisier, General Gérard and Juliette de Villeneuve). The economy in the choice of accessories, and the treatment of the background often summarized in a neutral tone. An assurance in the drawing and the lines. A search for realism in the representation of the costumes, a concern of the resemblance and expressions little marked even dry, except for the more graceful female portraits.

Élie Faure gives an appreciation of his technique as a portraitist: “…with their murky and gray backgrounds and their hesitant matter, with their expressive vigor and their fidelity…they live, and yet their life holds within precise limits. They are built like monuments and yet their surface stirs. They breathe strength and freedom at the same time.

The concern for realism that characterizes his portraits has led most critics to consider that there was a duality in David, on the one hand the painter of history, theorist of the beautiful ideal conflicting with the portraitist, painter of intimate realism. This second aspect of his art being often considered as superior, summarized by these words of André Chamson: “what classifies David in the first rank of our painters, it is above all the portrait”.painter of the rationalist passion, he was the excellence in the faithful and objective reproduction of the things, but failed to insufflate the fertile seed of the life there. “…a permanent confusion between the truth that he met and the life that he believed to reach.”

He made three paintings with religious subjects, Saint Jerome hearing the trumpets of the Last Judgment, the Saint Roch interceding the Virgin, and a Christ on the Cross. He did not paint still life, and he is credited with only one landscape which he painted from the window of the Luxembourg Palace in 1794 when he was imprisoned.

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Drawings

David”s graphic work is very important in number. There are at least a thousand drawings, grouped in twelve “Roman albums,” plus fourteen notebooks constituting 680 folios and 468 isolated drawings made at various times, including 130 drawings during his exile in Brussels. The Louvre has a large collection with 415 folios (including eight notebooks and two Roman albums).

The techniques used range from charcoal to washes, including black stone, which he favored, and ink drawing enhanced with washes, and more rarely pastel and sanguine. In his large compositions, he combined several techniques. According to the state of progress of the drawings David designates them according to the classification of Antoine Joseph Dezallier d”Argenville in “thoughts” for the less elaborate, then come the “stopped drawings”, the “studies” for the work on anatomy or on a part of a body, the “academies”, and the “cartoons” for the drawings constituting the final state of a work like the one in ink and wash for The Oath of the Palm Game, the only one David exhibited for the Salon of 1791 In practice, David could not dispense with models for his drawings and the elaboration of his works.

David”s graphic work is divided into several types, he used drawing to make copies after the Antique. During his stay in Rome he built up a collection of drawings which later served as sources and models for his later works. A large number of Roman landscapes are recorded, mainly urban views painted between 1775 and 1785, although he did very little in this genre in painting. La Douleur (1773, Beaux-Arts de Paris) is a drawing with black stone, estompe and highlights of pastel and white on beige paper, in 1773, David won with this drawing the first prize of the competition of the Head of expression, established in 1760 by the Count of Caylus, created to allow young artists to deepen the study too neglected expression of passions. The use of pastel, however sparingly, combined with white chalk, black stone and brown paper, makes this work an exception in the artist”s graphic corpus. He also made friezes of antique inspiration, caricatures and a famous drawing representing Marie-Antoinette led to the scaffold (1793, Louvre), as well as projects for medals or costumes.

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Style

Delecluze considered that there was no single style in David”s work, but rather an evolution that could be observed through four stylistic periods represented by the Oath of the Horatii (1784), the Death of Marat (1793), the Sabines (1799) and the Rite of Napoleon (1808).

David, born in 1748 in the middle of the Rococo period, was influenced by this style and its leader François Boucher. The first painting attributed to the painter, discovered in 1911 by Saunier, Jupiter and Antiope (before 1770), shows the influence that Boucher”s style had on David. This style still marks the academic teaching of this late eighteenth century, and permeates David”s painting when he competes for the Prix de Rome. His first three works, Combat of Mars against Minerva, Diana and Apollo Piercing the Children of Niobe with their Arrows, and Death of Seneca, combine the influence of both Boucher and Doyen. It is difficult to deduce from these canvases the evolution towards the antique rigor that would characterize David, as they are so marked by the rococo aesthetic, with a vivid, even garish palette, and a grandiloquent composition.

The French art starts at the time an aesthetic change, the rococo falls in disuse, the antique is in fashion. The Bâtiments du roi, aware of this change, encouraged the artists in this direction. Compared to his fellow students Vincent, Peyron and Suvée, David”s painting, although a student of Vien, the painter who symbolized this renewal, seemed to be behind the times, as evidenced by his failures to obtain the Grand Prix de Rome. In contrast, his first portraits of the members of the Buron and Sedaine families, show a more realistic workmanship and a simpler composition, despite obvious anatomical clumsiness.

Vien”s teaching was to bear fruit, and force David to discipline his painting with Erasistrate discovering the cause of Antiochius” illness, which allowed him to win the grand prize. This painting marks a clear change from his previous attempts, as much in the choice of a less vivid palette, as in a more rectilinear and less grandiloquent composition. This success did not prevent David, then on his way to Rome, from expressing reservations at the time against the style inherited from Antiquity: “Antiquity will not seduce me; it lacks spirit and does not move.

Between his departure for Rome and the end of his stay marked by his Belisarius, David will radically change his pictorial style, and convert unreservedly to neo-classicism. But this stylistic maturation will take place in several stages, before arriving at the manner that characterizes the last paintings of the Roman period.

On his way to Rome, he stopped in Parma, Bologna, and Florence, and was struck by the masters of the Italian Renaissance and the Baroque, Raphael, Correggio, and Guido Reni among others, who cast doubt on his attachment to the French style. He was particularly attracted by the Bolognese school, whose simplicity of composition and vigorous drawing he noticed. He would later say of his revelations: “As soon as I arrived in Parma and saw the works of Correggio, I was already shaken; in Bologna I began to make sad reflections, in Florence I was convinced, but in Rome I was ashamed of my ignorance.” This revelation did not immediately materialize in his painting or drawings. In Rome, he had to make copies from the antique, according to the directives of his master Vien.

It is from this period (1776-1778) that two great historical compositions date, the drawing Les Combats de Diomède and the painting Les Funérailles de Patrocle. Compared to his previous historical compositions, David shows a less theatrical approach, a more frank modeling and colors, but still remains influenced by the French and Baroque style that he now rejects. One can recognize the influence of Charles Le Brun”s battles as much in the choice of an elongated format as in the profusion of figures, but one can also detect the marks of modern artists he saw in Rome, those of the Bolognese school and the compositions of Gavin Hamilton, the first representative of neo-classicism to which he refers.

The year 1779 marked a turning point in the evolution of David”s style, mainly due to the influence of Caravaggio, José de Ribera and especially Valentin de Boulogne, whose Last Supper he copied. This copy, which has since disappeared, showed dark colors, a dramatic atmosphere in the treatment of shadows, which contrasted with his previous productions. Also from this period are a study of a philosopher”s head and an academy of Saint Jerome, whose realism refers to Ribera. For Schnapper, it was in 1779 that his style really changed and David became David. David later explained to Delécluze how he had perceived this realistic style and how he was impregnated by it:

“Also when I arrived in Italy with M. Vien, I was first struck by the vigor of the tone and the shadows in the Italian paintings that came to my attention. It was the quality absolutely opposite to the defect of the French painting, and this new relation of the clear ones with the shades, this imposing vivacity of modelling of which I had no idea, struck me so much that, in the first times of my stay in Italy, I believed that all the secrecy of art consisted in reproducing as some Italian colorists of the end of the XVIth century did, the frank and decided modelling that almost always offers nature. I will confess, that then my eyes were still so coarse that, far from being able to exercise them with fruit by directing them on delicate paintings like those of Andrea del Sarto, of Titian or of the most skilful colorists, they really seized and understood well, only the brutally executed works, but full of merit moreover of Caravaggio, Ribera, and this Valentin who was their pupil.

During this period, David experienced moments of exaltation followed by discouragement, which manifested themselves in his artistic work. Paradoxically, it is in these moments of crisis and doubt that his style will develop and that he will achieve mastery. However, the ancient models that he copied in Rome were not yet plastic and stylistic references for him; he stuck to modern pictorial models. It was his stay in Naples and the discovery of the antiquities of Herculaneum that made him change his mind and had the effect of a revelation. He confessed later that he had been operated on by a cataract. It is difficult to know if this revelation was so brutal, David having probably amplified the importance of the event afterwards. However, on his return from Naples, he produced two major works that show a new direction.

Saint Roch interceding for the Virgin exposes his way of restoring the realism assimilated through the Bolognese and Caravaggio examples. This commissioned work, the first masterpiece in his painting, marks its originality by the figure of the plague victim in the foreground, whose realism breaks with the disembodied figure of the Virgin. In the abrupt treatment of the chiaroscuro, the frank shadows, the abandonment of decorative colors for dull, almost gray tones (which he was criticized for), through these procedures David focuses the eye on the central composition. By its subject the painting is not original in itself, it refers as much to Poussin in the order of the figures, as to Caravaggio in the ascending character of the composition and Raphael for the figure of the virgin, but it is its pictorial treatment that reveals an originality that surprised the observers and David”s fellow students.

If the Saint Roch showed how David had understood and restored the realistic styles inherited from the modern Italian schools, the Frieze in the Ancient Style, a long drawing of more than two meters (since cut in two pieces), shows by its composition with profiled figures, the assimilation of the teachings from the ancient world that David had received since 1776, or even the acculturation to Roman antiquity, as Philippe Bordes points out. He refers directly to the bas-reliefs adorning Roman sarcophagi. In comparison with his previous drawing, Les Combats de Diomède, the differences show how far he has come. The sobriety of the gestures and expressions, the composition in frieze instead of the pyramidal line in force in French painting at the time, no longer allow any reference to the French rococo style.

Between Saint Roch and Belisarius David painted the only portrait of his Roman period, the equestrian portrait of Count Potocki, which stands out in this period by the choice of a more vivid palette and a lighter style, which shows, through the treatment of the drapery and the horse, another influence on his painting, those of the Flemish masters he saw in Turin and Rome, and more particularly Antoine van Dyck. The expressiveness and eloquence of the gesture that he made his model adopt became the trademark of the Davidian style. We can also see an antique element, the base of the two columns on the Piranesian stone wall, an allusion to the personality of the model, a lover of antiques and nicknamed the Polish “Winckelmann”.

Belisarius Asking for Alms, begun in Rome and completed in Paris for the 1781 Salon, shows even more than Saint Roch the strong influence of Nicolas Poussin”s painting and of the classical style tradition, an influence that can be seen in the treatment of the Roman landscape in the background of the painting, and in the distribution of the characters. He became aware of this influence through his classmate and rival, Peyron: “It was Peyron who opened my eyes. The resolutely orthogonal composition is characterized by the space separated in two, delimited by the colonnades. The only criticism made by contemporary observers is the choice of muted and dark colors. But the painting marks a date in the history of neo-classical painting, it is the first time that the subject by its moral character typical of the exemplum virtutis, advocated by the director of the Buildings of the king d”Angiviller, agrees perfectly with the pictorial way of representing it.

The short period of his return to Paris, which goes up to the Oath of Horace, the painting that marks his return to Rome (between 1781 and 1784), confirms David”s attachment to the style inherited from Antiquity and to the dark manner of the Caravaggio. But it is also characterized by a sentimentality that can be discerned in the Sorrow of Andromache, notably by the emphatic treatment of the female figure and the order of the decor close to Septimius Severus and Caracalla of 1769, which show an inspiration borrowed from Jean-Baptiste Greuze. This sentimentality is tempered by a geometric composition of a very Poussinian rigor. The discovery in 1985 of a study of a vestal virgin, dated from this period, confirms this “Greuzian” tendency. The pictorial style is then completely asserted, in the treatment of the backgrounds whose rubbings, not yet as apparent as in the Marat, show however an ease in the mastery of the brush, as well as in the modeling and the treatment of the draperies.

From this period also come four portraits, that of Alphonse Leroy, those of his parents-in-law the Pécouls, and that of François Desmaison. The lighter tones, the brighter and more harmonious colors and the attention paid to the naturalistic details of the accessories (the rendering of the lamp in the portrait of Alphonse Leroy, for example), are the result of the influence of the Flemish masters that he observed during a short stay in Flanders at the end of 1781

With the Oath of the Horatii David exposes his manifesto of neo-classicism. The style is radicalized, as much in the treatment of the geometrical space delimited by the columns and arches, as in the hieratic poses. The work constitutes a novelty, by its finish, the precision of the lines, the cold character of the colors, the anatomical rigor. The painting is in break with the painting of its time and is not comparable with any of the works made at the time. The rules of academic composition, based on unity, are overturned by David who divides the space into two groups with differentiated expressions, the male group built on straight lines opposed to the curved lines of the female group. This way of dividing the painting will be repeated in the Brutus and the Sabines. The workmanship is smooth, whereas the pictorial technique of 18th century France favored the full brushstroke. Observers of the time, artists and contemporary critics, agreed that David had improved his treatment of color, abandoning the black tones of Caravaggio that characterized his Andromache. But they criticize the uniformity and the alignment of the poses, which recall the bas-reliefs. This stylistic constant in Davidian history painting was often misunderstood and considered to be its flaw.

With this painting, the Davidian style became the norm in neo-classical painting, both in David, whose subsequent history paintings Socrates and Brutus confirmed this orientation, and in artists who were contemporaries of him, including the younger generation represented mainly by his pupils. The characteristic work that marks this influence was Marius à Minturnes by Jean-Germain Drouais, whose pose and order are borrowed from David”s Horaces.

In the Death of Socrates, David, receptive to the critics who had criticized the excessive rigor of the construction and the simplicity of the figures, softened his style, using more shimmering colors and a more natural ordering of the figures. On the other hand, the decoration remains, as for the Horatii, built according to a strict geometry.

The lictors bring Brutus the bodies of his sons is the last painting in the series of pre-revolutionary history paintings. In this work David, aware of the criticism that he was systematically putting his figures on a single plane in imitation of bas-reliefs, decided to distribute the figures on three levels of depth. In the foreground Brutus in the shadows, in the second the weeping women, and in the third the procession of lictors carrying the bodies of the consul”s sons. He also tries to inject movement, where his previous history paintings were static. The last painting in David”s Roman neo-classical style, it is also the result of the painter”s desire to give it an archaeological authenticity, by using the bust of Brutus from the Capitol for the figure of the consul, and by including the allegorical statue of Rome on the left side of the painting, as well as the Roman-style furniture.

In the evolution of David”s style, a particular work stands out because of its treatment and its subject : Les Amours de Pâris et d”Hélène. Painted between Socrates and Brutus, it is his first painting on the theme of the mythological couple (he will also paint Sapho and Phaon, the Farewells of Telemachus and Eucharis and Love and Psyche). He tried here the gallant register and for the first time was inspired by Greek aesthetics, which culminated in the Sabines, particularly in the choice of nudity as an expression of the beautiful ideal, close to the ideas of Winckelmann.

The portrait of Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier and his wife is the only important portrait of this period. David shows here his virtuosity in treating the accessories, the chemical instruments constitute a still life in the painting. He chooses a realistic and intimate range in an unusual format rather devolved to history painting or court portraiture. The portrait of the Lavoisiers is staged by having Marie-Anne Paulze take on the role of the muse. With this portrait he comes closer to the style of the social portrait then in vogue at the time, particularly with the portraits of Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun.

David”s style during the Revolution was characterized by a freer way of painting, linked in part to the abandonment for a time of antique and mythological history painting. He painted contemporary subjects and intimate portraits. His political career reduced his artistic activity and he left several paintings unfinished, but at this time he produced one of his major works, Death of Marat.

The Oath of the Palm Court was a large-scale project that was never completed. In this painting David”s ambition was to adapt his style as a history painter to an event that was contemporary to him. He was inspired by the example of American painters who depicted the events of the American War of Independence, such as John Trumbull, whom he met at that time. But he was not satisfied with the treatment. The trivial character of the city costumes, did not seem to him adapted to the painting of history, whose ideal was the representation of naked heroes.

Between 1789 and 1791, the series of portraits he painted showed a new style. The figures are framed below the knees, and stand out against a bare, brushed background in such a way that vibrant smears can be perceived. His paintings break with the affected sentimentality of the portraits of the time. The portraits of the Countess de Sorcy-Thélusson and Madame Trudaine (unfinished) are representative of this new style. All these portraits show a faster and freer execution, David deliberately leaves some parts, details of the clothing, the hair, or the background, less finished than others.

In the Death of Marat David mixes the ideal and the realism, with an economy of means that borders on pared down. He chooses the simplicity of the motif by giving a purified image free of all accessories. He makes a departure from his realism by idealizing Marat, without the stigma of the skin disease that affected him in reality. By taking inspiration from Caravaggio”s Entombment, he once again makes reference to Caravaggio. The work borrows from the religious art of the Italian Renaissance. Apart from Caravaggio, Marat”s posture recalls Baccio Bandinelli”s Pietà, which David saw in the Basilica of Santissima Annunziata in Florence, and also an ancient model, a bas-relief known as the bed of Polyclitus.

The painting was rediscovered by Baudelaire in 1846 at the Bazar Bonne-Nouvelle exhibition. At the height of the realist movement, he wrote :

“All these details are historical and real as a novel by Balzac; the drama is there alive in all its lamentable horror, and by a strange turn of strength that makes this painting David”s masterpiece and a great curiosity of modern art, it has nothing trivial or ignoble.

For Charles Saunier it is “the indispensable precursor” of this artistic movement. But Verbraeken points out the ambiguity of the term applied to this painting, which predates this movement, as it can mean the treatment and pictorial rendering as much as the representation of reality. As a propaganda painter, David”s intention was first to exalt a model of republican virtue, by making Marat a modern exemplum virtutis. Hence the role of the inscriptions on the canvas, whether letters or David”s dedication on the wooden log, in supporting the message of the painting. He used this rhetorical device in several paintings, including Les Derniers Moments de Michel Lepeletier (disappeared or destroyed), which was the counterpart to the Marat.

The Sabines inaugurates David”s aesthetic orientation towards the “pure Greek”. Under the influence of John Flaxman”s illustrations of the Iliad and the Odyssey, he drew his figures in a more linear, idealized manner. He abandons the martial character and the apparent musculature that characterized his Roman style, for smooth figures. He also distributed light evenly, and opted for a range of light colors, whereas his previous history paintings were marked by chiaroscuro. The paradox is that David, who seeks to return to the sources of Greek art with this painting, chooses a subject from Roman history. On the other hand, as in the Horatii, David returns to a composition where the main characters are on the same plane.

But above all he painted his main characters naked. This new way of representing his figures was explained by David in a notice that accompanied the exhibition of the painting: De la nudité de mes héros. In his biography on David, Delécluze explains his master”s program: “I have undertaken to do something completely new, I want to bring art back to the principles that were followed by the Greeks. When I did the Horatii and the Brutus I was still under the Roman influence. But, gentlemen, without the Greeks, the Romans would have been only barbarians in art. It is thus with the source that it is necessary to go up, and it is what I try to make at this moment. David takes up Winckelmann”s conceptions of the “ideal beauty”, also influenced by certain works of his pupils, including Girodet”s Sleep of Endymion. This new aesthetic approach was already underlying in one of his last works of his revolutionary period, Death of Young Bara, which presented an androgynous ephebe figure inspired by the Borghese hermaphrodite. These nudes shocked the public when the painting was exhibited and caused a scandal. In 1808, for the second exhibition of the work, in order to calm the public”s fears, David masked the sex of Tatius by repainting it and moving the scabbard of his sword.

This orientation towards the ideal beauty and the Greek nude, was criticized by the most radical pupils of David. These grouped in the Barbus sect, reproached the master for not having gone far enough in archaism and aesthetic primitivism. It is by taking into account some of the objections of this group, that David painted a picture whose workmanship and subject matter aimed to be even more Greek than the Sabines, Leonidas at Thermopylae. But for Nanteuil the style suffered from a two-stage execution, begun in 1799, it was not completed until 1814, which is felt in the composition, the order and the movements of the figures.

The influence of Greek antiquity was also felt in three portraits he painted between 1799 and 1803. The Portrait of Madame de Verninac which represents the model dressed in antique style in a bare setting and a hieratic pose, giving Henriette de Verninac the appearance of the goddess Juno. The style is colder, more precise. In his technique David is less free, he abandons the characteristic rubbing of his revolutionary portraits. He reiterates this formula in the portrait of Madame Récamier (which he abandons in an unfinished state), of which he translates what Nanteuil designates as “the spirit of simplicity that attracted him to Greek art”. With Bonaparte crossing the Great St Bernard, David adapted the heroic style of his history paintings to an equestrian portrait. Apart from the accessories and the effects of the costume, all of which are true, the whole painting idealizes Napoleon Bonaparte in the stylistic line of the “ideal beauty”, to the point of sacrificing his likeness. For Philippe Bordes, David”s sculptural aesthetic has perhaps never been more explicit than in this painting.

With The Rite of Napoleon, conceived as a large portrait gallery, David contributed to the vogue for the Empire style. This style, which was originally decorative and architectural, refers to the official works produced for the Napoleonic regime, of which David, along with François Gérard, Antoine-Jean Gros and Robert Lefèvre, is one of the main representatives. David”s production in the Empire style is represented by two large ceremonial canvases, The Coronation, and The Distribution of Eagles; and several ceremonial portraits, including the portrait of Pope Pius VII, the Emperor in Coronation costume; of dignitaries and wives, including the portraits of Estève, the Countess Daru, and of the French of Nantes, which Klaus Holma considers to be an exemplary example of the style, as well as the last portrait that David painted of the Emperor, Napoleon in his study.

In David”s work, this style is expressed in a dry, stiff drawing, and cold tones borrowed from Veronese and Rubens. The Coronation is a direct reference to the Coronation of Marie de Medici by the Flemish painter. David moves away from his neo-classical paintings and is inspired by the great court paintings such as those of Rubens, but perhaps also by Raphael and his Coronation of Charlemagne in the Vatican. Contrary to his habit of distinguishing groups separately in his history paintings (the Horatii, the Brutus, the Sabines), the work is characterized by a unified composition. In the hieratic poses that avoid any theatricality, the light that connects the different groups while focusing the gaze on the main protagonists, and the cold and discreet colors, David gives the scene a balanced and harmonious character.

The harmonious character that had made the success of the Rite is missing in the Distribution of the Eagles, which is weaker. The composition is unbalanced, in particular because of the suppression of the winged victory, which creates a void in the canvas, and to the erasure of the figure of Josephine de Beauharnais, related to the circumstances of Napoleon”s divorce. The theatrical and grandiloquent character of the soldiers” and marshals” attitudes betray clumsiness in the treatment of attitudes that are frozen and without aplomb. David was unable to restore the animation of the movements, unlike his former student Gros. All these elements weaken the composition whose general aspect seems confused.

In 1780, David”s appearance on the neo-classical scene was late, whereas following Winckelmann”s Reflection on the Imitation of the Greeks, painters had already begun this return to the ancient model since the 1760”s. His master Vien, like Pompeo Batoni, is considered a transitional artist between rococo and neo-classicism, with Mengs and Gavin Hamilton being the first artists representative of this style. According to Michael Levey, David”s novelty was that he combined both aesthetic and moral inspiration in his neo-classicism, that he wanted to blend reason and passion, rather than nature and antiquity.

Despite several lists of works by Jacques-Louis David, established by the artist himself, which gave a fairly complete overview of his production, at the death of the painter, appears a significant number of new paintings that are attributed to him by mistake. This has led some art historians to analyze his artistic style on the basis of false attributions. Jean-Jacques Lévêque points out that David”s success and high price tag has long allowed minor works to be sold, taking advantage of the confusion of style or name (in other cases, the absence of a signature, but the notoriety of the model, lead to erroneous attributions, (In other cases, the absence of a signature, but the notoriety of the model, led to erroneous attributions, as in the case of the portrait of Barère at the rostrum, exhibited as a David at the exhibition Les Portraits du siècle (1883), today restored to Laneuville (Kunsthalle, Bremen), or that of Saint-Just or that of the flautist François Devienne (Musées royaux des beaux-arts de Belgique), which was still considered to be an authentic David in the 1930s.

In 1883, Jacques-Louis Jules David, the painter”s grandson and author of an important monograph Le peintre David, souvenirs et documents inédits, remarked at the exhibition Les Portraits du siècle that of the nineteen paintings presented as autographs, only four could be considered unquestionably in David”s hand, and pointed out that none of the six self-portraits on display was authentic.

Sometimes the error is propagated by experts who let themselves be misled, which was the case for the portrait of the conventional Milhaud, whose attribution was supported by the presence of a dedication To the conventional Milhaud, his colleague, David-1793, which turned out to be false: in 1945 Gaston Brière revealed from a miniature replica that it had been painted by Jean-François Garneray, one of his students. In other cases, the controversy was settled in court: the judgment concerning the attribution of the assassinated Marat of the Palace of Versailles, an unsigned replica, which renowned experts and artists maintained to be authentic, was pronounced in the first instance against the plaintiff, widow of Jacques-Louis Jules David, who nevertheless owned the original.

The retrospective exhibitions provided an opportunity to take stock of the state of the collections. The 1948 David exhibition, held in honor of the second centenary of his birth, excluded from David”s works the Conventional Gérard and his family and the portrait of the flautist Devienne; In 1989, during the exhibition David 1748-1825, Antoine Schnapper rejected the attribution of a portrait of Quatremère de Quincy and the Three Ladies of Ghent (Musée du Louvre), whose signature, like that of the Conventional Milhaud, was falsified, and expressed doubts about the portrait known as the Jailer in the Musée de Rouen

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David”s artistic technique

With the dissolution of the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture, the teachings of the old masters were lost, according to Eugène Delacroix. David was the last holder of the pictorial traditions of the past.

David”s technique can be seen in the unfinished sketches he left behind, which allow us to observe his way of painting and learn about the processes involved. Some canvases, such as the Unfinished Portrait of Bonaparte, show the light-colored whitewash on which he painted; he also painted on glue-based backgrounds. J. P. Thénot, in his book Les Règles de la peinture à l”huile (1847), gives the colors that form the painter”s palette:

“David”s palette, order of colors from the thumb, lead white, Naples yellow, yellow ochre, ru ochre, Italian ochre, red brown, burnt Sienna, fine carmine lacquer, Cassel earth, ivory black, peach or vine black. Indistinctly Prussian blue, ultramarine blue, mineral blue, then he placed below these colors the cinnabar and vermilion. Towards the end of his career he added to his palette chrome yellow and red chrome for painting draperies only.”

In the composition of his paintings, he abandoned the pyramid structure then in vogue in the 18th century, preferring frieze compositions inspired by ancient bas-reliefs, which was reproached to him by Jean-Baptiste Pierre: “But where did you see that one could make a composition without using the pyramidal line? He generalized this construction from the Oath of the Horatii by relying on symmetrical and parallel constructions. Charles Bouleau indicates that David used an orthogonal scheme based on the folding of the small sides of the rectangle; Louis Hautecœur, observes that the framework of the Rite of Corpus Christi was divided into medium and extreme reason. No painting or sketch of David”s shows a regulating layout that allows us to verify his way of composing. This line was deduced by Charles Bouleau from a drawing by Girodet for Hippocrates refusing the gifts of Artaxercès, which shows a rare example of this compositional technique in a neo-classical work.

Meticulous, even laborious in his pictorial work, David redid several times a motif that did not satisfy him. In the Oath of the Horatii, he repainted the left foot of Horace twenty times.

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Retrospective exhibitions

David”s influence can be evaluated by the number of students he received in his workshop: from 1780 to 1821, between 280 and 470 students graduated, or even more according to Verbraeken, without specifying the number. He observes that the longest list published by J.-L. David omits students registered in the register of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, whose membership in David”s school is specified.

The school was founded in 1780 upon his return from Rome; the first students were, among others, Jean-Baptiste Wicar, Jean-Germain Drouais, Girodet-Trioson. The expression “School of David” was used at the beginning of the nineteenth century to describe both his workshop and his influence on the painting of his time. However, David favored the expression of original talents far removed from his painting, the most characteristic example being that of Antoine-Jean Gros, whose style announced the romanticism of Géricault and Delacroix, and moved away, in painting and subject matter, from the classical style of his master. Far from being opposed to him, he remained faithful to him and took over David”s studio during his exile.

Other students adopted an attitude of dissent towards David”s teaching. Wanting to go further than their master, the Barbus group wanted to radicalize neo-classicism by orienting it towards a more primitive Antiquity, inspired by the most archaic Greek style. David also opposed Girodet and Ingres, whose aesthetic orientations he did not understand; after seeing Girodet”s painting Apotheosis of the French heroes who died for the fatherland during the War of Liberty, he reacted in these terms:

“Ah that! He is crazy, Girodet!… He is crazy, or I do not hear anything more in the art of painting. They are characters of crystal that he made us there… What a pity! With his beautiful talent, this man will never do anything but crazy things… He has no common sense.

Concerning Ingres, his Jupiter and Thetis “is like a delirium”. He adds: “I don”t know how to paint anymore. I was the master of Ingres, it is up to him to teach me.

Several of David”s students were his assistants. Drouais helped his master with the Oath of the Horatii, Jean-Baptiste Isabey worked on Les Amours de Pâris et d”Hélène, François Gérard on Les Derniers moments de Michel Lepeletier, three students collaborated on Les Sabines, Jean-Pierre Franque, Jérôme-Martin Langlois and occasionally Ingres, who also worked on the portrait of Madame Récamier. Georges Rouget is considered David”s favorite assistant, he worked on two of the replicas of Bonaparte au Grand-Saint-Bernard, Le Sacre de Napoléon, where he is represented alongside his master, Leonidas at Thermopylae and the rehearsal of the Sacre.

The impact of David”s workshop was probably a determining factor in the construction of a contemporary vision of art. This vision does not oppose any more the styles but transcends them by taking into account “the whole of the contradictory forces which are exerted on the creations”.

The first biography on the painter was written during his lifetime by Chaussard in the French Pausanias. It stopped in 1806, before the exhibition of the Sacre. In 1824, an anonymous author published a Notice sur la vie et les ouvrages de David. But it is in 1826, one year after his death, that the first complete biography of the painter appears: Vie de David, published anonymously under the initials “A. Th.”, attempts to clear the artist of his role during the revolution. The identity of the author is disputed; the royalist police thought that it was Adolphe Thiers who had written a review of the painter in 1822, but nowadays this attribution is generally discarded. The old bibliographies attribute it to a Thomé, nephew of the conventionalist Thibaudeau, mistakenly named Antoine, it is in fact Aimé Thomé who added “de Gamond” to his surname on the occasion of his marriage. He himself claimed to be the author and would have received royalties. However, for Antoine Schnapper, the attribution is questionable because he gives precise details about the revolutionary period of the painter, which makes him lean towards an attribution of the work to Antoine Claire Thibaudeau, former regicide conventionnal and friend of David, and like him in exile in Brussels. This attribution had already been suggested by A. Mahul in his obituary and Delafontaine. Wildenstein specifies that Thibaudeau takes most of the information from the anonymous book Notice sur la vie et les ouvrages de David of 1824. Other sources attribute it to his son Adolphe Thibaudeau, journalist and important collector of drawings. Several biographies that appeared after this one, by A. C. Coupin to Miette de Villars, adopt the same point of view.

In 1855, Étienne-Jean Delécluze was more objective about the role of his former master during this period; he was a student of David”s and relied on his memories and first-hand accounts to write his biography Louis David son école et son temps. Despite its age and certain inaccuracies, this work is still considered a reference. During retrospective exhibitions, interest in the painter”s work was revived; several historians published detailed studies on David in the Gazette des beaux-arts or the Revue de l”art français ancien et moderne. At the beginning of the 20th century, essayists approached David”s work according to the political currents of the time, such as Agnès Humbert, who published Louis David, peintre et conventionnel: essai de critique marxiste in 1936. From 1948, the bicentenary of the painter”s birth, and after the great retrospective exhibition at the Orangerie, the renewal of Davidian studies saw the emergence of more objective and less passionate approaches. D. Dowd published an in-depth study of David”s role during the revolution Pageant-master of the Republic: Jacques-Louis David and the French Revolution, Louis Hautecœur wrote in 1954, a century after Delécluze, Louis David the first modern monograph on the painter, Alvar Gonzales Pallacios in his David et la peinture napoléonienne is interested in the painter”s art under the First Empire. After Antoine Schnapper”s great biography of David in 1980, David Witness of his Time, the 1989 exhibition was an opportunity to address new themes on David”s art in the context of the David vs. David symposium, where the artist was analyzed from several angles by several art historians.

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External links

Sources