DAVID, Jacques-Louis

This drawing is from Album 7, folio 41 recto.

In the spring of 1792 David received a most unexpected commission. This was to paint the king in the act of showing the constitution to his heir, the Dauphin. David was certainly no royalist and the fact that he actually started work on the picture meant that he thought that it could be a positive contribution to the course of the moderate Revolution. As well as studies for Louis XVI Showing the Constitution to his Son, the Dauphin, David also made drawings for an Allegory of the French People Offering the Crown and Sceptre to the King. These paintings were never realized.

David became a full Academician with Andromache Mourning Hector, which he presented on 23 August 1783, just in time for it to be shown at the Salon. The painting represents a scene from Homer’s Iliad where Andromache grieves over the body of her husband Hector, who has been killed by Achilles in the Trojan War. The subject of a widow and a young child might have evoked personal memories for David; the fatherless Astyanax is shown trying to console his mother in the midst of her grief, and he appears to be about the same age as David was when his own father was killed.

In the first period of the Revolution, David continued to paint portraits of the cultivated upper classes and aristocracy. In 1790, a year of social calm, he had painted the Marquise d’Orvilliers and the Countess de Sorcy. These two women were the Rilliet sisters, Robertine and Anne-Marie-Louise, who had both married rich and titled husbands, and David shows them dignified and at ease, wearing the simple fashions of the day.

David, ambitious and excitable, competed in 1771 for the Prix de Rome, which went to Suv�e. In 1772 David lost out to Jombert and Le Monnier, and he nearly killed himself in despair. In 1773, his Seneca was passed over in favour of Peyron’s more Poussin-like version. David finally won the prize in 1774 with Antiochus and Stratonica, though the palette is too red and shot which shafts of light in a setting that lacks rigor. His work was maturing from year to year, but David’s evolution was one of the most laborious ever known.

After the successful St Roch, David chose a subject from ancient history. The story of Belisarius was that of a loyal and successful general in the service of the Byzantine emperor Justinian. He had won major victories against the Vandals, Goths and Bulgarians, but he then became implicated in political intrigues, was accused of treason and disgraced. He became an outcast and was even reduced to begging; one version of the story also said that his eyes were put out.

The painting shows a scene - Belisarius is recognized by one of the soldiers who served under him just as he receives alms from a woman - which is David’s own invention, not having occurred in any of the written sources. This painting was the first fully resolved example of the new heroic and austere style that is now known as Neoclassicism. it is a picture with a serious subject that is painted in a sober and rational style. Few characters, set as if on a stage, exchange meaningful and easily understood gestures. Belisarius is a painting about charity, sympathy, dutiful patriotism and the reversal of fortune. Announcing the old man desperate situation, and appealing to the spectator’s charitable sensibilities, the Latin inscription ‘Date Obulum Belisario’ (Give an obulus - an ancient Greek silver coin - to Belisarius) is displayed on the marker stone in the bottom right-hand corner.

Full of enthusiasm for the new ruler of France, David painted Bonaparte, Calm on a Fiery Steed, Crossing the Alps. The title shows what could be expected of the general: he would be capable of ruling supremely well over an unruly Europe.

David and his studio executed four versions of this painting,

In March 1790 David stayed a month in Nantes. There he was warmly welcomed and feted as France’s leading painter and at one reception drew the head of Brutus to give his hosts an idea of his recent Salon success.

In 1783, Andromache Mourning Hector was shown with about six other works at the Salon. One of these was the Christ on the Cross, painted for the Marshal de Noailles and his wife, Catherine Fran�oise Charlotte de Cosse-Brissac. Formerly a highly placed courtier with King Louis XV, and a military commander in the War of the Austrian Succession, Noailles was created a marshal of France in 1775, but had little influence at the court of the new king Louis XVI. Both he and his wife were devoutly religious. Noailles commissioned a series of religious works for the family chapel in the Capucines church in the Place Vend�me from David, Jean Charles-Nicaise Perrin and Joseph-Benoit Suv�e. David found such religious subjects uncongenial, and this was the last he ever painted.

While painting the Consecration David was faced with the problem of selecting the most significant moment of the ceremony to commemorate. At first, he planned to show Napoleon raising Josephine’s crown above his own crowned head while pressing his ceremonial sword close to his heart. The emphasis on the sword may be an invention of David’s to emphasize Napoleon’s heroism and chivalry. In the final work, Napoleon is shown raising the crown in both hands before placing it on Josephine’s head and the sword now appears on Napoleon’s left side in the opening of his mantle.

David had originally intended to portray the event faithfully, showing Napoleon crowning himself. The Emperor, remembering the quarrels between the Pope and the Holy Roman Empire, placed the crown on his own head to avoid giving a pledge of obedience of the temporal power to the Pontiff. But he evidently felt that it would not be desirable to perpetuate this somewhat disrespectful action in paint; so David painted the coronation of Josephine by Napoleon, with the Pope blessing the Empress.

Grouped round the altar, near Napoleon, are the chief dignitaries — Camb�c�res, the Lord Chancellor, Marshal Berthier, Grand Veneur, Talleyrand, the Lord Chamberlain, and Lebrun, the Chief Treasurer. Madame de la Rochefoucauld carries the Empress’s train; behind her are the Emperor’s sisters, and his brothers Louis and Joseph. In front of the central stand are some of the marshals, and in it is Marie Laetitia, Madame M�re (the Emperor’s mother), who was in fact not present at the ceremony.

David planned to show the Pope watching the event with his hands on his knees, but Napoleon intervened and in his usual forthright manner exclaimed: ‘I didn’t have him come all that way to do nothing.’ Therefore, in the final work the Pope gives a blessing with his mitre at his feet and with his magnificent papal tiara, a gift from Napoleon, placed on the altar behind him.

At the left are two of Napoleon’s brothers, Joseph and Louis, both of whom were given kingdoms in 1806 by their brother - Joseph became King of Naples and Louis became King of Holland. Next to them are their sisters Caroline Murat, Pauline Borghese and Elisa Bacchiochi, with Louis’s wife Hortense holding the hand of little Prince Charles, and Julie, wife of Joseph.

The exact title of the painting is: Consecration of the Emperor Napoleon I and Coronation of the Empress Josephine in the Cathedral of Notre-Dame de Paris on 2 Dec 1804.

David was commissioned by Napoleon to paint a large composition commemorating his consecration, which had taken place in Notre Dame in Paris, on 2 December 1804. The picture was exhibited in the Salon Carr� in the Louvre in 1808, then in the Salon of that year; it was next placed in the Tuileries, in the Salle des Gardes. Under Louis Philippe it was installed at Versailles in a room decorated in imitation of the Empire style, together with David’s Distribution of the Eagles and Gros’ Battle of Aboukir; in 1889 it was transferred to the Louvre, and its place at Versailles was taken by Roll’s Marseillaise. In 1947 this latter picture was replaced by a replica of David’s Consecration of Napoleon, begun by the painter in 1808 and not finished till 1822, in Brussels; this replica was bought by the Mus�es de France in England, in 1946.

David seems to have derived his general composition from Rubens’ Coronation of Queen Marie de Medici.

In accordance with David’s usual method, numerous studies, both painted and drawn, preceded the actual execution of the work. The best-known of these is the portrait of Pius VII, now in the Louvre. The painter then made a model, where he arranged dolls in costume.

David had originally intended to portray the event faithfully, showing Napoleon crowning himself. The Emperor, remembering the quarrels between the Pope and the Holy Roman Empire, placed the crown on his own head to avoid giving a pledge of obedience of the temporal power to the Pontiff. But he evidently felt that it would not be desirable to perpetuate this somewhat disrespectful action in paint; so David painted the coronation of Josephine by Napoleon, with the Pope blessing the Empress.

Grouped round the altar, near Napoleon, are the chief dignitaries — Camb�c�res, the Lord Chancellor, Marshal Berthier, Grand Veneur, Talleyrand, the Lord Chamberlain, and Lebrun, the Chief Treasurer. Madame de la Rochefoucauld carries the Empress’s train; behind her are the Emperor’s sisters, and his brothers Louis and Joseph. In front of the central stand are some of the marshals, and in it is Marie Laetitia, Madame M�re (the Emperor’s mother), who was in fact not present at the ceremony.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 11 minutes):

Modest Mussorgsky: Boris Godunov, Coronation Scene

David received a lucrative commission for a grand portrait of a Polish nobleman, Count Stanislas Potocki. Although begun in Rome, the painting was actually completed a little later in Paris.

Potocki came from one of the most celebrated Polish families, and had recently become very wealthy thanks to his wife’s dowry. He was also a scholar, and translated and commented on the work of Winckelmann. Obviously his portrait had to be impressive and suggestive of his status. Therefore David depicted him on horseback, subduing a skittish horse with consummate ease. David turned to the example of the great Baroque portraitist Anthony van Dyck to create a work that was similar in scale and impact.

David’s first history painting in exile was an extremely original and disturbing interpretation of the late antique myth of Cupid and Psyche. It was painted for the wealthy Italian patron and connoisseur Count Giovanni Battista Sommariva and, although planned in Paris, it was only finished in Brussels in 1817.

As related by the Roman writer Lucius Apuleius in The Golden Ass (late second century AD), Cupid, the god of love, fell in love with the beautiful Psyche and brought her to his palace, where he visited her every night without ever letting her see his face. But curiosity got the better of her, and one night Psyche looked at Cupid while he was asleep. Unfortunately, a drop of hot oil fell from her lamp and awakened him, whereupon he abandoned her and the palace disappeared. From then on Psyche was condemned to wander the earth and perform impossible tasks in the vain hope of winning her lover back.

Many other artists saw the lovers as innocent, tender and poetic, but David deliberately drew attention to the sexual aspect of the relationship. Normally Cupid was shown as a beautiful young man, but David depicted him as a grinning adolescent who seems proud of his recent conquest. A great contrast is set up between Cupid’s coarse ruddy features and awkward angular limbs, and the pale, smooth and languid beauty of the sleeping Psyche. Unusually for David, the colours are bright and intense; in Brussels, he looked at the colours used by Flemish Renaissance artists such as Jan van Eyck.

David took inspiration from several ancient texts, including an obscure, recently published Greek poem by Moschus that describes Cupid as a mean-spirited brat with dark skin, flashing eyes, and curly hair.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 4 minutes):

Francesco Gasparini: The Meddlesome Cupid, aria

Such an ambitious project as The Oath of the Tennis Court required an enormous amount of preliminary work and David filled two sketchbooks and many individual sheets with details and figure studies. He went to Versailles and drew the empty tennis court, and experimented with the poses of the deputies. As he had not witnessed the oath, he wrote little notes on his sketches to remind himself of how characters should appear, and which small but telling details to include: ‘do not forget to show the deputies moved to tears and holding their hands to their eyes’, ‘remember to show the dust that was raised by the movement of the action’ and ‘remember the bell’ (used not very successfully by Bailly to call the noisy and animated deputies to order). David saw the oath as a modern and greatly expanded version of the Horatii and the deputies became the equivalents of the heroes of antiquity.

David probably drew Marat while the body was on display and this drawing, with its network of crosshatching in the manner of an engraving, isolates the head and produces a macabre yet powerful portrait of the deceased. As with the final painting (The Death of Marat) there is no suggestion of the violent act that had taken place, and in the four corners David wrote A MARAT /L’AMI/DU PEUPLE/DAVID (To Marat, The Friend of the People, David).

David discovered the dramatically lit and forceful canvases of Caravaggio and his followers, and his full-length male nude and semi-nude studies such as Hector of 1778 and Patroclus of 1780 show how he had begun to use light and shadow to give weight and density to his figures.

David also began work in prison on a history painting on the theme of Homer Reciting his Verses to the Greeks; he closely identified with the blind poet of antiquity because of a shared sense of solitude and victimization.

Jacques-Louis David distinguished himself in France both as a painter and as a political figure, actively participating in the Revolution and later becoming Napoleon’s court artist. After Napoleon’s fall David went into exile in Brussels where he died.

Although David made his name with large heroic narrative pictures on themes from antiquity, some of his finest works are portraits of contemporaries, in which he combines lifelike realism with the severe compositions, controlled colour range and unostentatious brushwork of the Neo-classical style. Jacobus Blauw is an especially fine example, and interestingly combines the painter’s political and artistic concerns. The sitter was a leading Dutch patriot who, in 1795 or, as David dates the painting, year 4 of the French Revolutionary Calendar helped to establish the Batavian Republic. When the French army invaded the Netherlands later that year Blauw, along with his countryman Caspar Meyer, was sent to Paris to negotiate a peace settlement. It was then that they commissioned David to paint their portraits (the one of Meyer is in the Louvre). It is clear, however, that of the two it was Blauw whom David found more sympathetic.

Blauw is shown seated writing an official document, a device which enables the artist to organise the composition with strict geometry, predominantly horizontal and vertical lines meeting at a right angle and echoing the shape of the canvas. (Or one can think of the sitter as forming a pyramid above the desk.) The fiction that Blauw has just turned from his work to pause for thought provides the motive for presenting him in full-face view. David softens the discomfort felt in such direct confrontation, however, by placing the head off-centre and by leaving the eyes unfocused. The pose combines great stability with a sense of momentary action, and seems to give us an insight into Blauw’s character. He is shown in simple dress befitting a republican: a plain coat, a soft cravat, his own hair powdered, instead of an aristocrat’s wig. A wonderful touch enlivens his brass buttons: gleams of red, implying unexplained reflections from the artist’s studio, the viewer’s space.

David had begun the Leonidas at Thermopylae in 1798 as a companion piece to The Intervention of the Sabine Women. However, it was completed much later, in 1814.

The subject concerns Leonidas, King of Sparta, who in 480 BC held the pass at Thermopylae against the invading Persian army of Xerxes. Vastly outnumbered, Leonidas and his 300 handpicked volunteers were killed, but only after their heroic defence had ensured the safe retreat of the Greek fleet.

In the final painting, as the sentinel trumpeters sound the call to arms, on the right two soldiers rush to gather their weapons that are hanging from the branches of an oak tree. Leonidas sits on a rock facing out at the viewer, contemplating his and his soldiers’ fate. Seated at his right is Agis, his wife’s brother, who looks to his commander for orders. To emphasize the fervent patriotism of the Spartans, David once again includes an oath, and behind Leonidas three young soldiers lift up wreaths above two altars dedicated to Hercules and Aphrodite.

On either side of Leonidas are two very young warriors, hardly more than boys, one of whom ties his sandal, while the other bids a last farewell to his aged father. Leonidas had tried to send the two young men away from the battle under the pretext of carrying a message, but they had refused to go. It is perhaps this undelivered scroll that is partially visible at Leonidas’ feet; it reads in Greek, ‘Leonidas, son of Anaxandrides, King to the Gerousia (Spartan Council of Elders). Greetings.’ The final sacrifices having been made, all these men are ready to die for the glory of Sparta and in the background the baggage train departs with the possessions they will no longer need in this world. At the top left the soldier climbs the rock to inscribe the poignant message with the pommel of his sword.

The staunch resolution to fight is perhaps most evident at the left of the painting where the blind soldier Eurytas, who had also been sent away, returns led by his slave, carefully negotiating a step with his sandalled foot.

This drawing is from Album 7, folio 38 verso.

In the spring of 1792 David received a most unexpected commission. This was to paint the king in the act of showing the constitution to his heir, the Dauphin. David was certainly no royalist and the fact that he actually started work on the picture meant that he thought that it could be a positive contribution to the course of the moderate Revolution. As well as studies for Louis XVI Showing the Constitution to his Son, the Dauphin, David also made drawings for an Allegory of the French People Offering the Crown and Sceptre to the King. These paintings were never realized.

The sitter is Henriette Delacroix, the sister of the painter Delacroix who married in 1788 Raymond de Verninac de Saint Maur.

This is a case where a comparison will give a good idea of how differently the same subject was handled by Jacques-Louis David and one of his numerous pupils. David started the portrait of Madame R�camier in 1800 which was never finished. (However, incidentally, this portrait helped a contemporary item of furniture to become known under her name.) When the master learned that the lady had also commissioned his pupil G�rard to paint her, he is said to have refused any further service.

In David’s portrait, noble simplicity, expressed by the simple dress and the Spartan decoration, is also eloquent in the open face. This might well appear more to the modern viewer than G�rard’s version, which was judged to be more representative and flattering at the time. And comparisons with portraits of Madame R�camier by other artists suggest that G�rard had achieved a better likeness than David. The Spartan severity of David’s composition, the Neoclassical sparseness of the arrangement, the cool handling of the room, the distanced pose, with the lady turning her shoulder to the viewer, were all elements with which Neoclassicism had operated for long enough.

G�rard, by contrast, sets the lady in a noble park loggia, where she seems to be inviting to conversation. Her low-cut bodice is seductive, the red curtain flatters the subject and gives the flesh a rosy tint. Where David gave the beautiful woman a rather severe touch around the mouth, G�rard embellishes her features with the hint of a gentle smile, making her look younger. By contrast, David’s portrait in the antique manner looks rather forced. Perhaps these were the reasons why his painting was never finished. Madame R�camier gave G�rard’s portrait of her to her admirer Prince Augustus of Prussia, a nephew of Frederick II, who had met the French beauty at the salon of Madame de Staël. For state reasons a marriage was impossible, but in the painting Madame R�camier was ever present in the palace which Schinkel furnished for the Prince in 1817.

The sitter is the wife of Charles-Louis Trudaine, a friend of the artist. The painting is unfinished.

David’s art could also display a ruthless and fanatical streak that was in marked contrast to the heroism and patriotism of his revolutionary martyrs. David at his most savage is seen in his rapid drawing of Marie Antoinette on the Way to the Guillotine, done on 16 October 1793. He observed the queen from an upper window and his profile drawing is brutally frank. Marie Antoinette was only thirty-seven, but a year’s imprisonment had made her look much older. Her hair was prematurely grey and, robbed of her false teeth, wig and corset and seated on a wooden plank on the back of a tumbrel, she looked a pathetic figure. After a briefless of composure she met her end with great fortitude, dignity and calm, even apologizing to the executioner for having accidentally stepped on his foot.

With the illness of 1820, David began to sense the end of his life and was determined to paint one last grand statement. In 1821 he began work on Mars Disarmed by Venus and the Three Graces. Completed in 1824, the work is bold, surprising and puzzling, and many people then and now have wondered exactly what he meant by this strange scene played out against an ornate marble pavilion in the sky.

Mars, the god of war, is succumbing to the charms of Venus, but the outcome is still in doubt. Venus hesitates to place the crown of roses on his head - an emblem of submission to the pleasures of the flesh - and Cupid, who unties Mars’ sandal, has put down his bow with the golden arrow of desire and the leaden arrow of repulsion side-by-side and not yet fired. Mars is shown nude and David delicately placed one of a pair of rather scruffy cooing doves to conceal his genitals for the sake of propriety. The pale Venus is an extremely delicate and sinuous form and much thinner than this voluptuous goddess is usually depicted. Behind the divine couple on the antique couch are the Three Graces who perform aimless tasks. One offers a cup of wine to Mars who has no free hand to take it, another rolls his shield as if it were a child’s hoop and we can only wonder where the Grace on the left thinks she is putting Mars’ helmet. Traditionally, the Graces were the beautifuI handmaidens of Venus, but these are patently ‘graceless Graces’ and their gestures and expressions border on the absurd and comical.

The overall effect is certainly perplexing and unnerving and it is also painted in a highly coloured hard-edged style that perhaps suggests considerable contributions from his Belgian assistants.

Cupid, who unties Mars’ sandal, has put down his bow with the golden arrow of desire and the leaden arrow of repulsion side-by-side and not yet fired.

David’s first studies in Rome were drawings of Roman antiquities and landmarks. He filled two albums with these drawings.

While painting the Consecration, David was faced with the problem of selecting the most significant moment of the ceremony to commemorate. At first, he planned to show Napoleon raising Josephine’s crown above his own crowned head while pressing his ceremonial sword close to his heart. Although it is often said that this drawing and others show Napoleon crowning himself, it is known that he did not put on two crowns (itself a difficult task), and the crown he holds is certainly that of Josephine.

David and his studio executed four versions of this painting, differing only slightly in the colour of the mantle.

David did paint Napoleon once more, in 1812, but this commission came from a most unexpected source. Britain and France had been at war since 1803 but such was the emperor’s fame that a Scottish aristocrat, Alexander Douglas, later Duke of Hamilton, paid David the enormous sum of 1,000 guineas (18,650 francs) for a full-length portrait. This was not Napoleon the athletic and heroic warrior, but Napoleon the statesman and lawgiver who, as the burnt-down candle and the clock with a time of 4-13 am show, works far into the night for the benefit of his subjects. A scroll of paper in the bureau bears the word ‘Code”, which refers to the new Civil Code, actually in operation since 1804 but which was renamed the ‘Code Napoleon’ in 1807 in an obvious propaganda move to promote him as a legislator. In the portrait the emperor has evidently just stopped work and, as the sword on the chair indicates, now prepares to review the troops wearing the uniform of a colonel of the Foot Grenadier Guards.

Although he did not pay for it, Napoleon liked the picture and said: ‘You have found me out, dear David; at night I work for my subjects’ happiness, and by day I work for their glory.’

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 51 minutes):

Ludwig van Beethoven: Symphony No. 3 (Eroica) in E Flat major op. 55 (1803)

Working on the Consecration, David planned to show the Pope watching the event with his hands on his knees, as seen in this drawing, but Napoleon intervened and in his usual forthright manner exclaimed: ‘I didn’t have him come all that way to do nothing.’ Therefore, in the final work, Napoleon is shown raising the crown in both hands before placing it on Josephine’s head.

David discovered the dramatically lit and forceful canvases of Caravaggio and his followers, and his full-length male nude and semi-nude studies such as Hector of 1778 and Patroclus of 1780 show how he had begun to use light and shadow to give weight and density to his figures.

This portrait was probably commissioned through Madame Lavoisier, herself a painter and an ex-pupil of David. She is of at least equal importance with her husband in the composition, which celebrates the marriage of their minds through careful natural gestures and the recording of the chemical apparatus in which both were deeply interested.

Lavoisier was an eminent experimental physicist and chemist, a very wealthy tax farmer (an investor in a company hired by the government to collect duties on commodities - something for which he was later guillotined) and a member of the liberal intellectual �lite that advocated moderate reforms.

The painting records of the chemical apparatus in which the couple was deeply interested. A drawing by Madame Lavoisier shows her taking notes during one of Lavoisier’s experiments, in David’s picture it is Lavoisier who seems almost taking dictation from her.

David showed two portraits at the Salon of 1783, one of his uncle Desmaisons, and the other of Doctor Alphonse Leroy. Leroy was an obstetrician, and probably attended Madame David at the birth of her first child. David shows him as an intelligent and refined man, dressed in fine clothes, writing at his desk leaning on a volume of Hippocrates’ Morbi mulierum (The Diseases of Women), lit by a quinquet lamp - a recent invention that gave illumination equal in strength to a dozen candles. The only less than successful part of the picture is the angle of the sitter’s left arm that denies him a hand.

When David was released from the Luxembourg prison at the end of December 1794, he became ill and so requested permission from the Convention to visit his wife’s sister and her husband, Emilie and Pierre S�riziat, at their country house in Saint Ouen, near Tournan-en-Brie, about 32 km (20 miles) east of Paris. This visit was cut short by the accusations of May 1795 and arrest, but he returned there, accompanied by a guard, to recuperate after his second and final release in August. He then painted the portraits of his hosts. Madame S�riziat is shown in an interior setting with her young son, having just returned from a walk. Her cheeks are ruddy and she carries a recently picked bunch of wild flowers which are painted in a lively but meticulous manner.

These two portraits were testaments of friendship and, by showing them at the 1795 Salon, he could prove that he was still able to paint after his ordeals.

Emmanuel-Joseph Siey�s had been one of the prominent political figures of the Revolution and the Empire, a radical clergyman and was the author of the pamphlet What is the Third Estate? which had been so influential in the events of 1789. He had been present at the Oath of the Tennis Court, voted for the death of Louis XVI and helped Napoleon to seize power in the Brumaire coup of 1799. As the Latin inscription at the top of the painting tells us - AETATIS SUAE 69 - in 1817 he was David’s exact contemporary, but he appears much younger. There is a direct contact between sitter and viewer and from Siey�s’s pose and facial expression we get strong ideas about this man’s determination and obstinacy - characteristics with which David readily identified.

After the death of his father following a pistol duel in December 1757, aged thirty-five, David was placed successively in the care of two uncles, Fran�ois Buron (1731-1818) and Jacques-Francois Desmaisons (c. 1720-1789), who were both architects and building contractors.

In the autumn of 1795 David painted two important portraits, those of Jacobus Blauw and Caspar Mayer. Both men were in Paris as representatives of the new revolutionary government of the Netherlands, now renamed the Batavian Republic.

The image of Caspar Mayer is formal and distant. He was a shrewd and circumspect diplomat and David placed him in a self-conscious pose. Due to political reasons, Mayer never collected the painting from David’s studio, where it remained until the artist’s death.

David first met Napoleon in Paris on 10 December 1797, at one of the public receptions given to honour the victorious general. It was during the course of the dinner that David asked to paint Napoleon’s portrait, a request that was soon granted. Napoleon came to David’s studio in the Louvre, granting him only a single sitting of three hours, during which he was fidgety, impatient and eager to leave. From this sitting David only managed to paint the head and collar he still managed to capture the confidence and vitality of the nation’s hero.

The painting remained unfinished.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 51 minutes):

Ludwig van Beethoven: Symphony No. 3 (Eroica) in E Flat major op. 55 (1803)

After the death of his father following a pistol duel in December 1757, aged thirty-five, David was placed successively in the care of two uncles, Fran�ois Buron (1731-1818) and Jacques-Francois Desmaisons (c. 1720-1789), who were both architects and building contractors.

When in prison, David drew an oval portrait of a fellow detainee, the former Protestant minister, Jeanbon Saint-Andr�. Politically Saint-Andr� had much in common with David. David’s portrait shows him as upright and determined, with no hint of a man subdued by imprisonment. David, however, revealed his personal sense of injustice in an inscription in Latin at the bottom of the drawing: ‘A gift of friendship. Solace of affection. David made in chains Year III of the French Republic (1795) Messidor 20.’

In the first period of the Revolution, David continued to paint portraits of the cultivated upper classes and aristocracy. In 1790 he had painted the Marquise d’Orvilliers and the Countess de Sorcy, and around this time he also painted Madame Adelaide Pastoret, who, although of the upper class, is shown as a wife and mother without display of finery. The politics of the day called for homely virtues to be emphasized and any display of rank or status would have been considered suspect. Like so many of David’s paintings of the Revolution, this work was not finished, as we can see from the incomplete quickly brushed shimmering background (frottis) and the absence of a sewing needle in Madame’s hand. In all probability there was a split between the Pastorets and David over the latter’s increasingly extreme politics, which meant that the portrait was left in its present state.

The painting represents the wife of the artist. In Napoleonic Paris David and his wife were hardly a splendid or striking couple. The English novelist Fanny Burney called Madame David ‘a woman of no sort of elegance … and if she ever possessed any beauty, it had deserted her at an early period’, but in compensation she was clever, shrewd and penetrating, yet prone to sarcasm.

As with many other young artists, David used his close relatives as models for his first portraits. As well as his uncle Buron, he also painted his aunt, Marie-Josephe, and her daughter, Marie-Fran�oise, who had supported his wish to become a painter. Both paintings show a directness of approach and a sympathetic contact between artist and sitter that anticipate David’s later successes in portraiture.

Philippe-Laurent de Joubert (1729-1792) was an important figure in Montpellier, an art collector and founding member of the Soci�t� des beaux-arts in Montpellier in 1779. His portrait by Jacques-Louis David was probably executed in 1786 on the occasion of his election as member of the Acad�mie de peinture et de sculpture in Paris.

When David was released from the Luxembourg prison at the end of December 1794, he became ill and so requested permission from the Convention to visit his wife’s sister and her husband, Emilie and Pierre S�riziat, at their country house in Saint Ouen, near Tournan-en-Brie, about 32 km (20 miles) east of Paris. This visit was cut short by the accusations of May 1795 and arrest, but he returned there, accompanied by a guard, to recuperate after his second and final release in August. He then painted the portraits of his hosts. Unusually for David, the lawyer Pierre S�riziat is posed out of doors seated on his coat spread over a rock, an elegant and leisured country gentleman and reminiscent of English portraits by Reynolds and George Romney.

These two portraits were testaments of friendship and, by showing them at the 1795 Salon, he could prove that he was still able to paint after his ordeals.

While Pope Pius VII remained in Paris after the consecration, David also painted his portrait and thereby joined an illustrious band of past artists - Raphael, Titian and Vel�zquez - as the painter of a pontiff. David broke with protocol by sitting down while he worked, as previously tradition had dictated that the humble artist should kneel to paint the Pope. David, though, did appreciate the honour bestowed upon him and apparently put on fine clothes and wore a sword as he worked. He responded warmly to the venerable old pontiff and was both delighted and moved by the benediction that he received from the hand of Pius.

Having painted relatively few works during the Revolution, David worked with great energy while in prison, possibly using painting as an escape and as tangible evidence that he was a painter and not a politician. A pupil brought painting equipment and materials as well as a mirror which enabled him to paint his second self-portrait.Less agitated than his first effort, in this painting David stares out with a mixture of bewilderment and candour, brush and palette in hand, the tumour in his left cheek very prominent. (Because it was painted with the aid of a mirror, the swollen cheek appears on the right due to the inversion that accompanies a mirror image.) He appears younger than his forty-six years - a characteristic of not only his self-portraits but also some of his portraits.

In 1816, David painted the tender portrait of the Comtesse Vilain XIII and her Daughter. The 36-year-old comtesse had formerly been lady-in-waiting to the empress Marie Louise and had held Napoleon’s son, the king of Rome, at his christening in 1811. Her husband, Philippe Vilain XIIII, had been the mayor of Ghent and had been raised to the nobility by Napoleon in 1811. (The numerals XIIII after the family name were a reminder of a seventeenth-century ancestor who had presented the keys of Ghent to Louis XIV.) In the picture David gives a very frank yet affectionate portrayal of mother and daughter, although the comtesse complained about being forced to pose for hours on end. The end result was not only faithful and lifelike but also a beautiful piece of work. Like many of his Brussels portraits, the sitters are closely framed, bringing them near to the spectator.

In the first period of the Revolution, David continued to paint portraits of the cultivated upper classes and aristocracy. In 1790, a year of social calm, he had painted the Marquise d’Orvilliers and the Countess de Sorcy. These two women were the Rilliet sisters, Robertine and Anne-Marie-Louise, who had both married rich and titled husbands, and David shows them dignified and at ease, wearing the simple fashions of the day.

With The Distribution of the Eagle Standards, David’s official work for Napoleon ended, and now he undertook private commissions. The painting Sappho and Phaon was commissioned by the wealthy Russian diplomat and art collector Prince Nicolas Yusupov, who lived in Paris from 1808 to 1811.

Sappho was a poetess on the Greek island of Lesbos and her affection for the young women of the cult of Aphrodite was the origin of the word ‘lesbian’. However, she fell in love with the beautiful youth Phaon, the prot�g� of Venus, and when he only briefly reciprocated her love, she leapt to her death from the rocks at Leucadia.

Though this theme of legendary or mythological lovers was similar to that of The Loves of Paris and Helen of 1788, in this painting the couple are not totally self-absorbed and instead look out at the viewer, Phaon staring intensely and Sappho intoxicated with delight at her lover’s touch. Indeed, so transported is she that she still believes herself to be playing the lyre that is now held by Cupid. For this picture about the power of physical love and its effect on the individual, David gave his lovers an almost portrait-like degree of characterization, placing them very close to the edge of the picture plane and near to the spectator. To add to the almost unreal sense of mythology come to life he also bathed the scene in harsh daylight and used bright colours and hard contours.

If little else were known of David, the self-portrait that he painted in May 1791 certainly looks the image of a Romantic. Painted rapidly, with a spontaneous touch, it shows an excited, even wild young man, with freely curling hair, eyes aglow with almost visionary zeal. He is looking slightly dishevelled and with a piercing gaze, very different from the normally relaxed pose of his sitters and perhaps an indication of the internal conflicts that eventually led him to become a fully committed Republican.

Although defeated in the Prix de Rome in 1773, David had the satisfaction of winning the prize for the best drawing of an expressive head, with his image of Sorrow.

David’s first independent commission was for an altarpiece for the chapel of the Lazaret (or quarantine centre) in Marseille, France’s major Mediterranean port, and a place that lived in continual fear of contagion brought by travellers from the East. The picture was to commemorate a miraculous episode from the 1720 outbreak of the disease in the city when the fourteenth-century saint, who had suffered from the plague himself, reappeared and came to the aid of the sick.

David had tried to combine a depiction of a miracle, a visionary Baroque subject constructed according to the traditional rules, with the new manner of representation, which was no longer appropriate for the traditional approach. His clear neoclassical colouring, the evidently measurable proportions of the bodies, and the overall metrical construction all reveal the painful inability to combine on one level the earthly and the heavenly, the real story of the plague and its victim, with the historically intangible figures of the salvation. The painting is beautiful, but the realistic depiction of the suffering figures is much more moving for the viewer than is the Madonna, who is concerned with the child and not the pleading figure. The real and present suffering looks credible, but the religious aspect is no longer convincing. Paintings like this documented the end of religious painting for a long time.

This drawing (Album 7, folio 8 recto) is one of the few figure drawings for the abandoned project of an allegory to commemorate the role played by the city of Nantes in the events leading up to the Revolution.

Almost as soon as the Consecration was finished, David began work on his second huge Napoleonic painting, The Distribution of the Eagle Standards, which he completed in November 1810.

The event had taken place three days after the consecration, on 5 December 1804, when, in an obvious imitation of the standards of the imperial Roman legions, Napoleon presented the army regiments and the National Guard of the 108 departments of France with their own Eagle standards.

Although The Distribution of the Eagle Standards demonstrated fervent patriotism and devotion, there is also a less appealing side to the imagery. Just as the Napoleonic Empire created a model to inspire twentieth-century dictators, David’s paintings for the emperor provided artistic examples for their commemoration. Indeed, it later needed only a small leap of the imagination to turn such ideas into fascist and totalitarian art, and we are also reminded of the stage-managed propaganda of Hitler’s Nuremberg rallies held between 1933 and 1938.

In his later career, David developed a more intense and contrasting palette and a newfound desire for greater realism in his portrayal of figures in his classical history and mythological subjects.

The wrath of the hero Achilles at the proposed sacrifice of the Greek King Agamemnon’s young daughter was known in David’s time as much through Racine’s tragedy, Iphig�nie, as the original Euripides (c. 450 BC). David had first treated the subject in 1819, this canvas is now in the Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas.

The Arrival at the H�tel de Ville was one of the commemorative works planned by David.

The works young David produced for the Prix de Rome were in the decorative and rather playful style of the day, and gave few hints of the direction that his art would eventually take. In 1770 he was eliminated in the preliminary competition, and in 1771 he came second with The Combat of Mars and Minerva, a subject taken from Homer’s Iliad. At the time of the Trojan War, Minerva, goddess of wisdom and supporter of the Greeks, defeated Mars, god of war and an ally of the Trojans, in a battle. After Mars was felled, his lover Venus came to his rescue.

‘Only the French’, declared the Convention’s leader, Robespierre, ‘have thirteen-year-old heroes.’ This distinctly dubious compliment referred to the boy Joseph Bara, who disguised himself as a hussar in order to accompany Republican troops against rebel forces. News of his death reached Paris late in 1793, and under pressure to acknowledge popular feeling and protect his government, Robespierre insisted on full Pantheon honours for the boy.

This painting can be regarded as David’s finest work, in which he has perfectly succeeded in immortalizing a contemporary political event as an image of social ideals. David’s painting of Marat represents the peak of his involvement in the Revolution where invention, style, fervent belief and devotion combine to produce one of the most perfect examples of political painting. David presented the painting to the Convention on 14 November 1793.

Jean-Paul Marat saw himself as a friend of the people, he was a doctor of medicine and a physicist, and above all he was editor of the news-sheet Ami du peuple. He suffered from a skin disease and had to perform his business for the revolution in a soothing bath. This is where David shows him, in the moment after the pernicious murder by Charlotte Corday, a supporter of the aristocracy. David had seen his fellow party member and friend the day before. Under the impact of their personal friendship David created his painting “as if in a trance,” as one of his pupils later reported.

David takes the viewer into Marat’s private room, making him the witness of the moments immediately after the murder. Marat’s head and arm have sunk down, but the dead hand still holds pen and paper. This snapshot of exactly the minute between the last breath and death in the bathroom had an immense impact at the time, and it still has the same effect today.

David has used a dark, immeasurable background to intensify the significance. The boldness of the high half of the room above the figure concentrates attention on the lowered head, and makes us all the more aware of the vacuum that has been created. The distribution of light here has been reversed from the usual practice, with dark above light. This is not only one of the most moving paintings of the time, but David has also created a secularised image of martyrdom. The painting has often, and rightly, been compared with Michelangelo’s Pietà in Rome; in both the most striking element is the arm hanging down lifeless. Thus David has unobtrusively taken over the central image of martyrdom in Christianity to his image of Marat. Revolutionary and anti-religious as the painting of this period claimed to be, it is evident here that it very often had recourse to the iconography and pictorial vocabulary of the religious art of the past.

In his left hand Marat holds Charlotte Corday’s deceitful note that reads (in David’s own handwriting): ‘July 13 1793: Marie-Anne-Charlotte Corday to citizen Marat/ It is enough for me to be truly wretched to have a right to your kindness’. Corday’s actual note to Marat had ended: I am being persecuted for the sake of Liberty; I am unhappy, that is sufficient to give me the right to your protection’, and the change in wording suggests that she accomplished her murderous deed by appealing to Marat’s kind-hearted sympathy.

This painting was made in (a lost) competition with David’s rival, Pierre Peyron. Peyron’s simple, noble and severe composition is known only from an engraving. David’s work was turbulent, theatrical and lacking in gravity, giving no hint of Seneca’s dignified and restrained suicide, forced on him by order of the tyrannical Emperor Nero. Instead, the painting seems more concerned with the emotional farewell between Seneca and his wife Paulina.

At the approach of the French Revolution, when Greek and Roman civic virtues were extolled as salutary antidotes to the degeneracy of the Old Regime, David triumphed at the Salon with a succession of works, including this one, that gave clear expression to the moral and philosophical principles of his time. Socrates was accused by the Athenian government of impiety and corrupting the young through his teachings; he was offered the choice of renouncing his beliefs or being sentenced to death for treason. Faithful to his convictions and obedient to the law, Socrates chose to accept his sentence. Here Socrates reaches for the cup of poisonous hemlock while he discourses on the immortality of the soul. The Death of Socrates became a symbol of republican virtue and was a manifesto of the Neoclassical style.

Working on such a large scale with such a huge cast to manipulate, David resorted to Renaissance working practices to plan and organize the Consecration. As well as drawings of Notre Dame, studies for groups and individuals and details of uniforms and regalia, he also made full-scale cartoons of some figures.

Painting occupied only a fraction of David’s time during the Revolution. He also made designs for civic uniforms, for money and official seals and even produced two crudely drawn and vulgar caricatures that mocked the English. Since the Revolution his views on the English had clearly changed and he no longer felt them to be the epitome of a free nation. According to the print’s caption the English government ‘is personified by the figure of a Devil skinned alive, monopolizing commerce and covered with all the Royal decorations. The portrait of the king is located at the rear end of the government which vomits on its people a myriad of taxes which overwhelm them.’

In 1818 David painted The Farewell of Telemachus and Eucharis, a story of true lovers forced to part. Telemachus, son of Penelope and Odysseus, and Eucharis, one of the nymphs of the goddess Calypso, had an intense physical passion for one another but still remained pure and chaste because this physical love expressed a higher, spiritual love. Telemachus stares out at us with an expression of regret and sadness at his departure, while Eucharis throws her arms around her lover’s neck, making the most of their last moments together.

This is a preparatory drawing for his painting, in which David borrowed elements from the works of Nicolas Poussin and the reliefs of antique sarcophagi.

David, the political activist, was imprisoned in 1794. He survived the political change, and while still in prison planned a return to history painting and started work on The Intervention of Sabine Women, a project that was to occupy him until 1799. This subject, from ancient Rome, was the aftermath of the rape of the Sabines when, to ensure the population growth of their city, Romulus and his Romans abducted the womenfolk of their neighbours, the Sabines. Three years passed before the Sabine men, led by Tatius, mounted a counterattack. For the first time in a history painting by David, the central figure is a woman, Hersilia, who forces herself between Romulus, her husband, on the right, and the Sabine Tatius, her father, on the left. Other women cling to the warriors and place themselves and their children between the opposing groups.

In this painting David contrasted the violence of the rape with the pacification of the intervention. The image of family conflict in the Sabines was a metaphor of the revolutionary process which had now culminated in peace and reconciliation. The painting was a tribute to Madame David, and a recognition of the power of women as peacemakers.

For the first time in a history painting by David, the central figure is a woman, Hersilia, who forces herself between Romulus, her husband, on the right, and the Sabine Tatius, her father, on the left. Other women cling to the warriors and place themselves and their children between the opposing groups.

In place of the sinew and muscle of the men in The Oath of the Horatii, which came from close observation of the life model, Romulus and Tatius have smooth bodies, based on a study of sculpture.

This painting was exhibited at the salon of 1789, its full title was J Brutus, First Consul, returned to his house after having condemned his two sons who had allied themselves with the Tarquins and conspired against Roman liberty the lictors return their bodies so that they may be given burial.

In this painting David also deals with the subject of death in service of the state. This was an inflammatory subject in 1789, speaking out for self-sacrifice, the sacrifice of one’s own flesh and blood for a higher ideal.

Lucius Junius Brutus (not to be confused with Julius Caesar’s assassin Marcus Brutus, who lived some 500 years later), had helped to rid Rome of the last of its kings, the tyrannical Tarquin the Proud. This came about because Tarquin’s son Sextus had raped the virtuous Lucretia. She then committed suicide in the presence of both her husband Collatinus and Brutus, who withdraw the knife from the fatal wound and swore on Lucretia’s blood to avenge her death and destroy the corrupt monarchy. Tarquin was exiled and the first Roman republic was established in 508 BC, with Brutus and Collatinus elected as co-consuls. As the picture title tells us, Brutus’ two sons, Titus and Tiberius, were drawn into a royalist conspiracy to return Tarquin, and their father condemned them to death.

For the grim and terrible event depicted in the painting, David adopted a radical compositional format. The main character, Brutus, is placed at the extreme left, plunged into deep shadow. His body is tense and knotted as he broods over the consequences of his act, he grasps the death warrant and clenches his feet one across the other. This last detail, in addition to the position of his arms, was probably taken from the figure of the prophet Isaiah on the Sistine Chapel Ceiling by Michelangelo. For the sake of accuracy David based the features of Brutus on a famous antique bust, the so-called Capitoline Brutus, of which he owned a copy. On the other side of the image the inconsolable women are brightly illuminated. The centre of the picture is taken up by a still-life of a sewing basket, an emblem of domesticity, which is rendered in stark clarity.

David skillfully illuminated the grief and allegorised the suffering, fear and pain of his figures. He shows the mother, accusing and suffering, her daughter beside her, hands raised defensively, and finally the younger daughter sunk down in pain at her impotence. Another figure at the right edge of the painting personifies grief. In the shadow sits the “hero” with the dark mien of a thinker. His features are stoic and harsh, his left hand is holding the written accusation in a claw-like grip, and he is seated in the shadow of the Roma, the symbol of the state to which the sacrifice is ultimately being made. Behind him, the son whose life has fallen victim to the requirements of the state is being borne in. A column strictly divides the theatrical arrangement into the representation of the dark force of destiny and the obvious emotional effect of the event.

David exhibited at the Salon of 1789 The Loves of Paris and Helen, an important private work for the Count d’Artois, the king’s dissolute brother. David had begun work on the painting in 1786, but, due to a long illness it was not completed until 1788. The Loves of Paris and Helen was a work on a new theme, and to express the amorous nature of the subject, David greatly modified the uncompromising and severe style of his previous paintings: the two figures are smooth and sculptural and are bathed in subtle light. David took great trouble over the details in this painting of courtship and physical attraction. A statue of Venus, goddess of love, is placed on a column at the left, and we also see two wreaths of myrtle, an evergreen sacred to Venus and an emblem of conjugal fidelity. For added, although incorrect, detail in the background, David included four caryatids copied from the Salle des Cent-Suisses in the Louvre.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 3 minutes):

Cristoph Willibald Gluck: Paride ed Elena, Paris’ aria

On June 20, 1789 more than 500 deputies of the third estate took the oath of allegiance in the tennis court in Paris. It was apparent that only the revolutionary painter David could be commissioned to depict this event.

David planned to produce a painting more than six metres long sublimating the historic oath and preserving it for posterity. He failed: the scrupulously detailed representations of the individual figures would not resolve into a unified composition. The time in which David was working was not ripe for the transmutation of a very profane present into a convincing history painting, and the work remained unfinished.

David owed his rise to fame - after many reversals - to a painting for the execution of which he took his family to Rome, in order to absorb himself totally in the world of antique forms. It was The Oath of the Horatii.

When he arrived to Rome, David rent a studio in the Via del Babuino. He worked in a very methodical manner on The Oath of the Horatii, drawing from life models and draped mannequins, and some very detailed studies survive for many of the main figures. He had accessories such as the swords and helmets made by local craftsmen so that they could serve as props. Drouais is supposed to have assisted David, painting the arm of the rear Horatii brother and the yellow garment of Sabina. The painting was finished at the end of July 1785, and was then exhibited in David’s studio. David signed the painting and added the painting’s place of origin to the signature and date: L David / faciebat / Romanae /Anno MDCCLXXXIV. The painting created a sensation, even the Pope wanted to view it.

The story is from the 7th century B.C., and it tells of the triplet sons of Publius Horatius, who decided the struggle between Rome and Albalonga. One survived, but he killed his own sister because she wept for one of the fallen foes, to whom she was betrothed. Condemned to death for the murder of a sibling, Horatius’ son is pardoned by the will of the people.

Because of its austerity and depiction of dutiful patriotism, The Oath of the Horatii is often considered to be the clearest expression of Neoclassicism in painting. The painting’s uncompromising directness, economy and tension made it instantly memorable and full of visual impact. Each of the three elements of the picture - the sons, the father and the women - is framed by a section of a Doric arcade, and the figures are located in a narrow stage-like space. David split the picture between the masculine resolve of the father and brothers and the slumped resignation of the women.. The focal point of the work is occupied by the swords that old Horatius is about to distribute to his sons. While the rear two brothers take the oath with their left hands, the foremost one swears with his right. Perhaps David did this simply as a way of grouping the figures together, but people at the time noticed this detail, and some supposed that this meant that the brother in the front would be the one to survive the combat.

David owed his rise to fame - after many reversals - to a painting for the execution of which he took his family to Rome, in order to absorb himself totally in the world of antique forms. It was The Oath of the Horatii.

When he arrived to Rome, David rent a studio in the Via del Babuino. He worked in a very methodical manner on The Oath of the Horatii, drawing from life models and draped mannequins, and some very detailed studies survive for many of the main figures. He had accessories such as the swords and helmets made by local craftsmen so that they could serve as props. Drouais is supposed to have assisted David, painting the arm of the rear Horatii brother and the yellow garment of Sabina. The painting was finished at the end of July 1785, and was then exhibited in David’s studio. David signed the painting and added the painting’s place of origin to the signature and date: L David / faciebat / Romanae /Anno MDCCLXXXIV. The painting created a sensation, even the Pope wanted to view it.

The story is from the 7th century B.C., and it tells of the triplet sons of Publius Horatius, who decided the struggle between Rome and Albalonga. One survived, but he killed his own sister because she wept for one of the fallen foes, to whom she was betrothed. Condemned to death for the murder of a sibling, Horatius’ son is pardoned by the will of the people.

Because of its austerity and depiction of dutiful patriotism, The Oath of the Horatii is often considered to be the clearest expression of Neoclassicism in painting. The painting’s uncompromising directness, economy and tension made it instantly memorable and full of visual impact. Each of the three elements of the picture - the sons, the father and the women - is framed by a section of a Doric arcade, and the figures are located in a narrow stage-like space. David split the picture between the masculine resolve of the father and brothers and the slumped resignation of the women.. The focal point of the work is occupied by the swords that old Horatius is about to distribute to his sons. While the rear two brothers take the oath with their left hands, the foremost one swears with his right. Perhaps David did this simply as a way of grouping the figures together, but people at the time noticed this detail, and some supposed that this meant that the brother in the front would be the one to survive the combat.

The swords glitter in the centre of the painting, and the outstretched arms raised in oath point to the weapons, indicating the coming deed. The finely judged angles of the arms form a melodious tripartite harmony, while the variously shaped swords express another aspect: this is not ordered preparation, it was a spontaneous action by ardent individuals.

The swords glitter in the centre of the painting, and the outstretched arms raised in oath point to the weapons, indicating the coming deed. The finely judged angles of the arms form a melodious tripartite harmony, while the variously shaped swords express another aspect: this is not ordered preparation, it was a spontaneous action by ardent individuals.

The Oath of the Horatii proved to be a triumph for David. The public was overwhelmed by his break with the Baroque stylistic tradition. For the first time, the unity of time and action had been brought into a deliberately severe composition. The story of the passionate readiness of these heroes for self-sacrifice was known, and it was also recognized that the weeping women in the composition are an expression of foreboding, symbols of the tragedy to come.

Painting occupied only a fraction of David’s time during the Revolution. He also made designs for civic uniforms, for money and official seals and even produced two crudely drawn and vulgar caricatures that mocked the English.

David worked in a very methodical manner on The Oath of the Horatii, drawing from life models and draped mannequins, and some very detailed studies survive for many of the main figures.

David’s first studies in Rome were drawings of Roman antiquities and landmarks. He filled two albums with these drawings.

Such an ambitious project as The Oath of the Tennis Court required an enormous amount of preliminary work and David filled two sketchbooks and many individual sheets with details and figure studies. He went to Versailles and drew the empty tennis court, and experimented with the poses of the deputies

David worked with great energy while in prison. He made the drawing of a Woman in a Turban in the style of an engraving. He very pointedly inscribed ‘J L David did this in chains’ (i.e. in prison).