DAVID, JACQUES-LOUIS

DAVID, JACQUES-LOUIS (1748–1825), French painter.

Between 1785 and 1815 Jacques-Louis David was the most important and influential painter in Europe. David's working life spanned the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, the Napoleonic era, and the Bourbon Restoration.

Born in Paris to a merchant family, he was the pupil of Joseph-Marie Vien (1716–1809). In 1774 David won the Prix de Rome contest at the Académie Royale and spent October 1775 to July 1780 in Rome. During the 1780s, David created dramatic and didactic paintings on morally elevating subjects such as the Oath of the Horatii (1785), a painting about patriotism and the sacrifice of the individual for the good of the nation. Its severe and spare style based on precise draftsmanship and hard-edged subdued colors was later termed neoclassicism. In 1789, shortly after the storming of the Bastille, he exhibited The Lictors Bringing Brutus the Bodies of His Sons; the republican nature of Brutus (who rid Rome of the last of its kings, the Tarquins) meant that in following years the painting acquired a political significance that David did not originally intend.

As a liberal David welcomed the promise of social change that the Revolution offered, and from September 1790, when he joined the Jacobin club, he became directly involved in politics. David opposed the privileges and elitism of the Académie Royale and was instrumental in its abolition in 1793. Elected a deputy of the Convention in September 1792, he allied himself closely with the "Mountain" group of Maximilien Robespierre (1758–1794). In 1793 David voted for the death of Louis XVI (r. 1774–1792) and served a term as president of the Convention in January 1794. Most importantly, David devoted his brush to the revolutionary cause and produced paintings that glorified three Republican martyrs, most notably the moving and iconic Marat at His Last Breath (1793). Here the radical journalist, assassinated by the moderate Charlotte Corday (1768–1793), was transformed into a saint to inspire revolutionary fervor and patriotism. David also designed and organized great Revolutionary festivals that worked as powerful propaganda instruments to unify the new Republic in celebrations of brotherhood and liberty.

At Robespierre's fall in 1794, David narrowly avoided the guillotine and spent a total of six months in prison, painting a Self-Portrait (1794), almost as a defense plea that he was a painter, not a politician. In prison he also started an ambitious history painting The Intervention of the Sabine Women (completed 1799), an image of reconciliation as the Sabine women separate the warring factions of their men folk and the Roman soldiers who have come to reclaim their abducted females. The picture also demonstrated a change in painting style from the muscular Roman bodies of the Horatii to smoother and more sculptural forms.

After release from prison, David vowed that he would no longer follow men but principles, but quickly came under the spell of Napoleon I (r. 1804–1814/15) whom he first painted early in 1798. Only the head was completed in a three-hour sitting. After Napoleon's coup of Brumaire (10 November 1799), David then painted Napoleon Crossing the Alps (1801), "calm on a stormy horse," as a commission from Charles IV of Spain (r. 1788–1808).

After Napoleon's coronation as Emperor of the French in December 1804, David was appointed his First Painter and charged with commemorating the events of the coronation. The Coronation of Napoleon and Josephine (also known as Le Sacre, 1805–1808) shows Napoleon crowning a kneeling Josephine in Notre Dame and is a glittering panorama of the new imperial court. To capture the splendor of the event, David moved away from his austere neoclassicism and worked in rich and sumptuous colors.

But David was a clumsy imperial courtier and asked for inflated prices for his work, which resulted in commissions being passed to less expensive artists. His last portrait of Napoleon (1812) was actually commissioned by the Englishman Alexander Douglas (later 10th Duke of Hamilton, 1767–1852). This life-size portrait showed the emperor as both soldier and lawgiver working for the people of France into the early hours of the morning.

After Napoleon's defeat and exile, all regicides were banished and although the restored Bourbon regime offered to let him stay in France, David moved to a frustrating exile in Brussels in 1816. His last large-scale painting, Mars Disarmed by Venus and the Three Graces (1824) reveals the unsettling combination of the real and the ideal and the overall effect bordered on parody. At his death in December 1824, David was denied burial in France and an impressive funeral was arranged for him by the Belgian government.

See alsoFrench Revolution; Jacobins; Napoleon; Painting.

bibliography

Bordes, Philippe. Empire to Exile. London, 2005.

Brookner, Anita. Jacques-Louis David. London, 1980.

Crow, Thomas E. Painters and Public Life in Eighteenth-Century Paris. New Haven, Conn., 1985.

David, Jean-Louis Jules. Le Peintre Louis David, 1748–1825: Souvenirs et documents inédits. Paris, 1880.

Delécluze, Etienne-Jean. Louis David, son école et son temps. Paris, 1855. Reprint, with introduction and notes by Jean-Pierre Mouilleseaux. Paris, 1983.

Lee, Simon. David. London, 1999.

Schnapper, Antoine. David. Translated by Helga Harrison. New York, 1982.

Schnapper, Antoine, and Arlette Sérullaz. David 1748–1825. Paris, 1989. Exhibition catalog.

Vaughan, William, and Helen Weston, eds. Jacques-Louis David's The Death of Marat. Cambridge, U.K., 2000.

Simon Lee