Jacques-Louis David
Jacques-Louis David was a highly influential French painter in the Neoclassical style, considered to be the preeminent painter of the era.  In the 1780’s his cerebral brand of history painting marked a change in taste away from Rococo frivolity toward a classical austerity and severity, heightened feeling chiming with the moral climate of the final years of the ancien régime. 

David was born into a prosperous Parisian family on August 30, 1748. When he was about nine his father was killed in a duel and his mother left him with his prosperous architect uncles.  They saw to it that he received an excellent education at the Collège des Quatre-Nations, but he was never a good student: he had a facial tumor that impeded his speech, and he was always preoccupied with drawing.  He covered his notebooks with drawings, and he once said, "I was always hiding behind the instructor’s chair, drawing for the duration of the class".  Soon, he desired to be a painter, but his uncles and mother wanted him to be an architect.  He overcame the opposition, and went to learn from François Boucher (1703–1770), the leading painter of the time, who was also a distant relative.  Boucher was a Rococo painter, but tastes were changing, and the fashion for Rococo was giving way to a more classical style.  Boucher realized that their temperaments were opposed and decided that instead of taking over David’s tutelage, he would send David to his friend Joseph-Marie Vien (1716–1809), a painter who embraced the classical reaction to Rococo.  There David attended the Royal Academy, based in what is now the Louvre.
 
David attempted to win the Prix de Rome, an art scholarship to the French Academy in Rome, four times between 1770 and 1774.  Finally, in 1774, David won the Prix de Rome. Normally, he would have had to attend another school before attending the Academy in Rome, but Vien's influence kept him out of it.  He went to Italy with Vien in 1775, Vien having been appointed director of the French Academy at Rome, David having won the Prix de Rome. In Italy David was able to indulge his bent for the antique and came into contact with the initiators of the new classical revival, including Gavin Hamilton.  While in Italy, David observed the Italian masterpieces and the ruins of ancient Rome.  David filled twelve sketchbooks with material that he would derive from for the rest of his life.  While in Rome, he studied great masters, and came to favor above all others Raphael.  In 1779, David was able to see the ruins of Pompeii, and was filled with wonder. After this, he sought to revolutionize the art world with the "eternal" concepts of classicism.
 
In 1780 David returned to Paris, and in the 1780’s his position was firmly established as the embodiment of the social and moral reaction from the frivolity of the Rococo.  His uncompromising subordination of color to drawing and his economy of statement were in keeping with the new severity of taste.  His themes gave expression to the new cult of the civic virtues of stoical self-sacrifice, devotion to duty, honesty, and austerity.  Seldom have paintings so completely typified the sentiment of an age as David's The Oath of the Horatii (Louvre, Paris, 1784), Brutus and his Dead Sons (Louvre, 1789), and The Death of Socrates (Metropolitan Museum, New York, 1787).  They were received with acclamation by critics and public alike.  Reynolds compared the Socrates with Michelangelo's Sistine Ceiling and Raphael's Stanze, and after ten visits to the Salon described it as in every sense perfect.
 
David was in active sympathy with the Revolution and a friend of Maximilien Robespierre (1758-1794), and was effectively a dictator of the arts under the French Republic.  He served on various committees and voted for the execution of Louis XVI.  His position was unchallenged as the painter of the Revolution.  His three paintings of 'martyrs of the Revolution', though conceived as portraits, raised portraiture into the domain of universal tragedy. They were: The Death of Lepeletier (now known only from an engraving), The Death of Marat (Musées Royaux, Brussels, 1793), and The Death of Bora (Musée Calvet, Avignon, unfinished).
 
Imprisoned after Robespierre's fall from power in 1794, he was released on the plea of his wife, who had previously divorced him because of his Revolutionary sympathies (she was a royalist).  They were remarried in 1796, and David's Intervention of the Sabine Women (Louvre, 1794-99), begun while he was in prison, is said to have been painted to honor her, its theme being one of love prevailing over conflict.  It was also interpreted at the time, however, as a plea for conciliation in the civil strife that France suffered after the Revolution and it was the work that re-established David's fortunes and brought him to the attention of Napoleon, who appointed him his official painter.
 
It was at this time that he developed his 'Empire style', notable for its use of warm Venetian colors.  David became an ardent supporter of Napoleon and retained under him the dominant social and artistic position which he had previously held. Between 1802 and 1807 he painted a series of pictures glorifying the exploits of the Emperor, among them the enormous Consecration of the Emperor Napoleon I and Coronation of the Empress Josephine (Louvre, 1805-07).  These works show a change both in technique and in feeling from the earlier Republican works.  The cold colors and severe composition of the heroic paintings gave place to a new feeling for pageantry which had something in common with Romantic painting, although he always remained opposed to the Romantic school.
 
With the fall of Napoleon and the return of the Bourbons to power, David figured in the list of proscribed former revolutionaries and Bonapartists for having voted execution for the deposed King Louis XVI and for participating in the death of his son Louis XVII.  The new Bourbon King, Louis XVIII, however, granted amnesty to David and even offered him the position of court painter.  David refused, preferring self-exile in Brussels. There, he trained and influenced Brussels artists like François-Joseph Navez and Ignace Brice, painted Cupid and Psyche and quietly lived the remainder of his life with his wife.
 
David created his last great work, Mars Being Disarmed by Venus and the Three Graces, from 1822 to 1824.  In December 1823, he wrote: "This is the last picture I want to paint, but I want to surpass myself in it.  I will put the date of my seventy-five years on it and afterwards I will never again pick up my brush."  The finished painting evoking painted porcelain because of its limpid coloration was exhibited first in Brussels, then in Paris, where his former students flocked to view it.  More than 10,000 people visited and viewed the painting.  In his later years, David remained in full command of his artistic faculties, even after a stroke in the spring of 1825 disfigured his face and slurred his speech.  In June 1825, he resolved to embark on an improved version of his Anger of Achilles.  David remarked to his friends who visited his studio "this is what is killing me" such was his determination to complete the work, but by October it must have already been well advanced as his former pupil Antoine-Jean Gros wrote to congratulate him, having heard reports of the painting's merits.  By the time David died, the painting had been completed and the commissioner Ambroise Firmin-Didot brought it back to Paris to include it in the exhibition "Pour les grecs" that he had organized and which opened in Paris in April 1826.

When David was leaving a theater, a carriage struck him, and he later died on December 29, 1825 at the age of 77.  At his death, some portraits were auctioned in Paris, they sold for little; the famous Death of Marat was exhibited in a secluded room, to avoid outraging public sensibilities.  As a result of having been a regicide of King Louis XVI, France disallowed the return of his body to France for burial.  The body of the painter Jacques-Louis David was instead buried at Evere Cemetery in Brussels, while his heart was buried at Père Lachaise, Paris.  His work had a resounding influence on the development of French and European painting, and his many pupils included such notables as François Gérard, Antoine-Jean Gros,  and Jean-Auguste-Dominque Ingres.


The Oath of the Horati


Madame Recamier


Hector


The Intervention of the Sabine Women


The Combat or Mars and Minerva


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