Jacques-Louis David
Painter of Neoclassicism and the Revolution.
Jacques-Louis David painted austere, classically inspired pictures of duty and virtue. He took part in the French Revolution and later became Napoleon's court painter.
Jacques-Louis David was born in Paris in 1748. His father was killed in a duel when David was nine, and he was brought up by relatives. He studied under the painter Joseph-Marie Vien. After several failed attempts he won the Prix de Rome in 1774 and lived in Rome from 1775 to 1780. There he studied classical sculpture and the paintings of Poussin, and left the Rococo behind.
His breakthrough came with the Oath of the Horatii (1784), which shows three brothers swearing to give their lives for Rome while the women grieve. The painting caused a sensation in Paris and is in the Louvre. It became a manifesto of Neoclassicism. He followed it with The Death of Socrates (1787), now in the Metropolitan Museum in New York, and The Lictors Bring to Brutus the Bodies of His Sons (1789) in the Louvre. All deal with duty to the state taking precedence over personal feelings.
During the Revolution David became a Jacobin and a member of the National Convention. He voted for the execution of Louis XVI and organised the great revolutionary festivals. The Death of Marat (1793) shows the murdered revolutionary in his bath as a martyr. It is in the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium in Brussels. After Robespierre's fall in 1794 David was imprisoned for a time. There he planned The Intervention of the Sabine Women (1799), about women who stop a war, now in the Louvre.
David's style is marked by clear contours, a smooth surface and a stage-like composition, almost like a theatre set or a classical relief. The colours are clear and the light sharp. Under Napoleon he became First Painter. He painted Napoleon crossing the Alps on a rearing horse and the vast Coronation of Napoleon (1805–07) in the Louvre. He also ran a large studio, where pupils such as Ingres, Gros and Gérard were trained.
When the Bourbons returned to power in 1815, David was exiled because he had voted for the king's death. He spent his last years in Brussels and died there in 1825. He had enormous influence on French art for half a century and is the artist above all associated with Neoclassicism.