Jacques-Louis David

1748 - 1825 • French • Painter • Neoclassicist

"The Academy is like a wigmaker's shop; you cannot get out of the door without getting its powder on your clothes. What time you will lose in forgetting those poses, those conventional movements, into which the professors force the model's torso, as if it were the carcass of a chicken. Even the latter ... is not safe from their mannerisms" - Jacques-Louis David

David was admitted into the French Royal Academy in 1766, and after a series of unsuccessful efforts finally won its PRIX DE ROME in 1774• His great HISTORY PAINTINGS, such as The Oath of the Horatii ( 1784), fulfilled both the CLASSICAL ideals he absorbed in Rome (in fact, he returned to Rome to work on the painting) and the French taste for political metaphor: father and son pledging themselves to the honor of their country, women weeping as their husbands, brothers, and lovers go off to war-individual self-sacrifice for the greater good. The story looked back to Horace and forward to the Republic. Serious, sober, spartan, and manly, it was so well admired that people of the time began to talk of "David's revolution." The Horatii was followed by Death of Socrates (1787), another heroic figure and moral message about a man maintaining dignity to the end. No less an authority than REYNOLDS proclaimed, "This picture is in every sense perfect." David's personal history followed the roller-coaster course of French politics. Early in the Revolution David supported Robespierre and the extreme wing of the Jacobins. After the Revolution, in 1790, he began his elaborate Oath of the Tennis Court, which commemorates the meeting, on June 20, 1789, at which the deputies of the Third Estate swore not to disband until they had given France its constitution. He showed a highly finished preparatory drawing of it at the first SALON of the Revolutionary period in 1791. This was a new kind of history painting, portraying current events rather than ancient or mythological ones. After the Revolution, David spearheaded the movement that led to replacing the academy with the short-lived Commune of the Arts. The comments quoted above were made in a speech to his students. With the downfall of Robespierre, David was imprisoned. Released, he unhesitatingly painted for Napoleon's Empire. When Napoleon returned from Elba, David declared his allegiance. With Napoleon's downfall, the aged David went into exile in Brussels, where he died. During the height of his power, David was as influential as LE BRUN had been a century earlier. Clear, solemn, heroic, powerfully dramatic yet simple in his composition, David was a NEOCLASSJCAL painter. This is seen in The Death of Marat (1793). Marat was a hero of the Revolution murdered in his bath by Charlotte Corday. (Marat had a skin condition that necessitated soaking in the tub, so he adapted a tub for use as his desk and received visitors as if in his office.) David had called on Marat the day before the murder. In David's painting, Marat has a stab wound on his chest, his head has fallen back, and his arm hangs loose. Marat is in the familiar pose of the dead Christ of many PIETAs; David based his rendering on paintings by RAPHAEL and by CARAVAGGIO.