Jacques-Louis David

Jacques-Louis David (born August 30, 1748, Paris, France—died December 29, 1825, Brussels, Belgium) was the most celebrated French artist of his day and a principal exponent of the late 18th-century Neoclassical reaction against the Rococo style.

David won wide acclaim with his huge canvases on classical themes (e.g., Oath of the Horatii, 1784). When the French Revolution began in 1789, he served briefly as its artistic director and painted its leaders and martyrs (The Death of Marat, 1793) in a style that is more realistic than classical. Later he was appointed painter to Napoleon. Although primarily a painter of historical events, David was also a great portraitist (e.g., Portrait of Madame Récamier, 1800).

Formative years

David was born in the year when new excavations at the ash-buried ruins of Pompeii and Herculaneum were beginning to encourage a stylistic return to antiquity (without being, as was long supposed, a principal cause of that return). His father, a small but prosperous dealer in textiles, was killed in a duel in 1757, and the boy was subsequently raised, reportedly not very tenderly, by two uncles. After classical literary studies and a course in drawing, he was placed in the studio of Joseph-Marie Vien, a history painter who catered to the growing Greco-Roman taste without quite abandoning the light sentiment and the eroticism that had been fashionable earlier in the century.

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At age 18, the obviously gifted budding artist was enrolled in the school of the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture. After four failures in the official competitions and years of discouragement that included an attempt at suicide (by the stoic method of avoiding food), he finally obtained, in 1774, the Prix de Rome, a government scholarship that not only provided a stay in Italy but practically guaranteed lucrative commissions in France. David’s prize-winning work, Antiochus and Stratonice, reveals that at this point he could still be influenced slightly by the Rococo charm of the painter François Boucher, who had been a family friend.

In Italy there were many influences, including those of the dark-toned 17th-century Bolognese school, the serenely classical Nicolas Poussin, and the dramatically realistic Caravaggio. David absorbed all three, with an evident preference for the strong light and shade of the followers of Caravaggio. For a while he seemed determined to fulfill a prediction he had made on leaving France: “The art of antiquity will not seduce me, for it lacks liveliness.” But he became interested in the Neoclassical doctrines that had been developed in Rome by, among others, the German painter Anton Raphael Mengs and the art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann. In the company of Quatremère de Quincy, a young French sculptor who was a strong partisan of the return to antiquity, he visited the ruins of Herculaneum, the Doric temples at Paestum, and the Pompeian collections at Naples. In front of the ancient vases and columns, he felt, he said later, that he had just been “operated on for cataract of the eye.”

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Rise to fame: 1780–94

Back in Paris in 1780, he completed and successfully exhibited Belisarius Asking Alms, in which he combined a nobly sentimental approach to antiquity with a pictorial technique reminiscent of Poussin. In 1782 he married the spirited Marguerite Pécoul, whose father was a wealthy building contractor and the superintendent of construction at the Louvre—a position that carried considerable influence. From this date David prospered rapidly.

The pathos and painterly skill of Andromache Mourning Hector brought him election to the Académie Royale in 1784; and that same year, accompanied this time by his wife and studio assistants, he returned to Rome with a commission to complete a painting that appears to have been originally inspired by a Paris performance of Pierre Corneille’s Horace. The result, finally not based on any of the incidents in the play, was the Oath of the Horatii. The subject is the solemn moment, charged with stoicism and simple courage, when the three Horatii brothers face their father and offer their lives to assure victory for Rome in the war with Alba; the pictorial treatment—firm contours, bare cubic space, sober color, frieze-like composition, and clear lighting—is as austerely non-Rococo as the subject. Exhibited first in David’s studio in Rome and then, following his return to France, in the official Paris Salon of 1785, the picture created a sensation; it was regarded as a manifesto for an artistic revival (the term Neoclassicism was not yet in use) that would cure Europe of the lingering addiction to dainty curves and boudoir themes. Eventually, it came to be regarded, although such was almost certainly not the first intention, as a manifesto for an end to the corruption of an effete aristocracy and for a return to the stern, patriotic morals attributed to republican Rome.

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David became a culture hero; he was even referred to in some quarters as a messiah. He added to his fame by producing in 1787 the morally uplifting Death of Socrates, in 1788 the archaeologically interesting Paris and Helen, and in 1789 another lesson in self-sacrifice, The Lictors Bringing to Brutus the Bodies of His Sons. By the time the Brutus was on view, the French Revolution had begun, and this picture of the patriotic Roman consul who condemned his traitorous sons to death had an unanticipated political significance. It also had, through its presumably accurate reconstitution of the details of everyday Roman life, an effect that was perhaps equally unexpected, for with it David began the long and extensive influence he was to have on French fashions. Up-to-date homes began to display imitations of his Roman furniture; men cut their hair short in the Roman style; and women adopted the dresses and the coiffures of Brutus’ daughters.

In the early years of the Revolution, David was a member of the extremist Jacobin group led by Maximilien Robespierre, and he became an energetic example of the politically committed artist. He was elected to the National Convention in 1792, in time to vote for the execution of Louis XVI. By 1793, as a member of the art commission, he was virtually the art dictator of France and was nicknamed “the Robespierre of the brush.” He preached moral and aesthetic sermons to the Convention:

The artist must be a philosopher. Socrates the skilled sculptor, Jean-Jacques [Rousseau] the good musician, and the immortal Poussin, tracing on the canvas the sublime lessons of philosophy, are so many proofs that an artistic genius should have no other guide except the torch of reason.

Guided supposedly by the torch of reason and perhaps also by bitter memories of his many unsuccessful attempts to win the Prix de Rome, he succeeded in abolishing the Académie Royale and with it much of the old regime’s system for training artists and providing them with patronage. The Académie was replaced briefly by a body called the Commune des Arts, then by a group called the Popular and Republican Society of the Arts, and then, finally, in 1795, after David was out of power, by the beginning of the system—a combination of the Institut de France and the École des Beaux-Arts—that dominated French artistic life during most of the 19th century.

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As an artist during these years of his dictatorship, David was frequently busy with revolutionary propaganda. He had commemorative medals struck, set up obelisks in the provinces, and staged national festivals and the grandiose funerals the new government gave its martyrs. Some of his projects for paintings at this time were never completely carried out: one of these is the unfinished Joseph Bara, which is a tribute to a drummer boy shot by the royalists, and another is the sketched Tennis Court Oath, June 20, 1789, which was to commemorate the moment when the Third Estate (the commoners) swore not to disband until a new constitution had been adopted. The Death of Lepeletier de Saint-Fargeau, painted to honor a murdered deputy and regarded by David as one of his best pictures, was eventually destroyed. The result of all this is that the artist’s Jacobin inspiration is represented principally by The Death of Marat, painted in 1793 shortly after the murder of the revolutionary leader by Charlotte Corday. This “pietà of the Revolution,” as it has been called, is generally considered David’s masterpiece and an example of how, under the pressure of genuine emotion, Neoclassicism could turn into tragic Realism.