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Jacques-Louis David
Jacques-Louis David, (born Aug. 30, 1748, Paris, France—died
Dec. 29, 1825, Brussels, Belg.), the most celebrated French TABLE OF CONTENTS
artist of his day and a principal exponent of the late 18th-
century Neoclassical reaction against the Rococo style. Introduction

Formative years
David won wide acclaim with his huge canvases on classical
Rise to fame: 1780–94
themes (e.g., Oath of the Horatii, 1784). When the French
Later years: 1794–1825
Revolution began in 1789, he served brie y 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 Mme 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-
Self-portrait by Jacques-Louis David, oil on
Roman taste without quite abandoning the light
canvas, 1794; in the Louvre, Paris.
sentiment and the eroticism that had been fashionable
Alinari/Art Resource, New York
earlier in the century. 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 of cial competitions and years of discouragement that included an
attempt at suicide (by the stoic method of avoiding food), he nally 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. His prize-winning work, Antiochus and
Stratonice, reveals that at this point he could still be in uenced slightly by the Rococo charm
of the painter François Boucher, who had been a family friend.

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In Italy there were many in uences, 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 ful ll 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.”

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 in uence. 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,
nally 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— rm contours, bare cubic space, sober colour, frieze-like
composition, and clear lighting—is as austerely non-Rococo as the subject. Exhibited rst in
David’s studio in Rome and then, following his return to France, in the of cial 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 rst 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 less uplifting but archaeologically
interesting Paris and Helen, and in 1789 another lesson
in self-sacri ce, 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
Oath of the Horatii, oil painting by Jacques-
sons to death had an unanticipated political signi cance.
Louis David, 1784; in the Louvre, Paris.
It also had, through its presumably accurate
Giraudon/Art Resource, New York
reconstitution of the details of everyday Roman life, an
effect that was perhaps equally unexpected, for with it David began the long and extensive
in uence 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. Later on, even the imsy Sabine dress, which
left the breasts exposed, was adopted by the ultramodern.

In the early years of the Revolution, David was a member

The Death of Socrates, oil on canvas by
Jacques-Louis David, 1787; in the
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City.
Art Media/Heritage-Images/Imagestate
of the extremist Jacobin group led by 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 brie y by a body called the Commune des Arts,
then by a group called the Popular and Republican Society of the Arts, and then, nally, in
1795, after David was out of power, by the beginning of the system—a combination of the
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Institut de France and the École des Beaux-Arts—that dominated French artistic life during
most of the 19th century.

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 un nished Joseph Bara, which is a tribute to a drummer boy shot by
the royalists, and another is the sketched Oath of the Tennis Court, which was to
commemorate the moment in 1789 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 honour 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.

Later Years: 1794–1825

In 1794, after his friend Robespierre had been sent to the

guillotine, David was arrested. At his trial he is said to
have defended himself badly, mumbling that in the
future he intended to attach himself “to principles and
not to men.” He was imprisoned twice, for four months in
1794 and for two more the next year, apparently most of
the time in the not uncomfortable Palais du
Luxembourg in Paris. He was consoled by being allowed
to paint and also by the fact that his wife, who had
divorced him two years earlier for having voted for the
death of the King, now loyally returned in his hour of
The Death of Marat, oil painting by Jacques-
trouble and remarried him, on this occasion for good.
Louis David, 1793; in the Royal Museums of
Fine Arts of Belgium. During his rst period in prison, he painted from his
World History Archive/age fotostock window his only landscape, the View of the Luxembourg
Gardens. While he was held temporarily in another Paris
building, he did an un nished self-portrait. At 46 he appears as a boyish young man with
romantically disheveled hair, brown eyes, and a generally aggressive, if worried, look; a cheek

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tumour from which he suffered all of his adult life and which is said to have impeded his
speech gives his face a slight twist.

Even during his imprisonment, he had retained three studios in the Louvre, and, after the
amnesty of 1795, he devoted to teaching the same energy he had been devoting to
revolutionary politics. Eventually, in the interval between his painting of Oath of the Horatii
and Napoleon’s defeat at the Battle of Waterloo, he was responsible for the training and
indoctrination of hundreds of young painters from all over Europe, among them such future
masters as François Gérard, Antoine-Jean Gros, and Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. The
indoctrination began with the premise that the basis of art was the contour, and so it can be
held partly responsible for the excessive emphasis on drawing that characterized European
academic painting in the 19th century. But David himself, as his works show, was not always
hostile to rich chromatic effects; as late as 1860 he could be called, by no less a colourist than
Eugène Delacroix, “the father of the whole modern school.”

Neoclassicism was presumably inclined to scorn portraiture, because a contemporary sitter

would normally lack both the universality and the nudity of an ancient statue. David,
however, had done portraits, remarkable for their psychological individuality and their look of
solid esh, since the beginning of his career: in 1782–83 his sitter had been Alphonse Leroy, a
Paris medical professor; in 1784 Mme Pécoul, his mother-in-law; in 1788 the chemist Antoine-
Laurent Lavoisier, with Mme Lavoisier. In 1795 the freed artist portrayed his pretty, elegant
sister-in-law, Mme Sériziat, and her dandyish husband. In 1800 he produced his famous
period piece, Portrait of Mme Récamier, which he left un nished because the sitter, then at
the start of her career as a reigning Paris beauty, proved unreliable about hours for posing.

But David was not a man for the life of a mere teacher
and portraitist. In 1799 he made a spectacular reentry
into public notice with a new giant canvas, The
Intervention of the Sabine Women. The picture, often
mistakenly referred to as The Rape of the Sabines,
represents the moment, a few years after the legendary
abduction, when the women, now contented wives and
mothers, halt a battle between their Roman husbands
Portrait of Mme Récamier, oil on canvas by and the Sabine men who have come on an unwanted
Jacques-Louis David, 1800; in the Louvre, rescue mission; in the middle of the melee stands the
Paris. 174 × 244 cm.
lovely Sabine woman Hersilia, appealing with one arm
Giraudon/Art Resource, New York
toward the Roman Romulus and the other toward the
bearded Sabine Tatius. The artist had said that his aim
was to move away from the allegedly crude Roman manner of the Oath of the Horatii into a
more graceful Greek manner, and he did win enthusiastic applause for the elegance of his
gures. He also won some approval for his supposed intention to preach conciliation after 10
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years of bloodletting in France. But he attracted perhaps the most attention with the
nakedness of his ancient warriors; having ceased to be the Robespierre of the brush, he now
became, in a popular jingle, “the Raphael of the sansculottes” (i.e., the Raphael of the radical
Republicans).

Napoleon admired The Intervention of the Sabine Women and saw possibilities for self-
aggrandizement in the talent displayed. Soon David, without acquiring political of ce, was
again a government painter, rst under the Consulate and then, after 1804, under the
Empire. He was not, however, the only prominent Frenchman to move from the Jacobin left
to the Bonapartist right, and he had evidently always been a worshiper of historical heroes.
His most important Napoleonic work is the huge Coronation of Napoleon in Notre-Dame
(1805–07), sometimes called Napoleon Crowning the Empress Josephine; in it Neoclassicism
gives way to a style that combines the of cial portraiture of the old French monarchy with
overtones—and occasional straight imitation—of the masters of the Italian Renaissance. This
picture was followed in 1810 by the large Napoleon Distributing the Eagles and in 1812 by The
Emperor Napoleon in His Study at the Tuileries, a sharply perceptive portrait
notwithstanding its conspicuously propagandistic intention.

After the fall of Napoleon in 1815, David was exiled to

Brussels. Cut off from the excitement and stimulus of the
great events he had lived through, he lost much of his
old energy. Toward the end of his life, he executed,
probably with considerable help from a Belgian pupil,
François-Joseph Navez, one more remarkably convincing
portrait: The Three Women of Ghent.

The Emperor Napoleon in His Study at the

Tuileries, oil on canvas by Jacques-Louis
David, 1812; in the National Gallery of Art,
Washington, D.C.
© Photos.com/Jupiterimages

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Leonidas at Thermopylae, oil on canvas by

Jacques-Louis David, 1814; in the Louvre,
Paris. 3.95 × 5.31 m.
Photos.com/Jupiterimages

Roy Donald McMullen

CITATION INFORMATION
ARTICLE TITLE: Jacques-Louis David
WEBSITE NAME: Encyclopaedia Britannica
PUBLISHER: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.
DATE PUBLISHED: 22 January 2019
URL: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Jacques-Louis-David-French-painter
ACCESS DATE: January 31, 2019

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