David, Jacques-Louis

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Jacques-Louis David

1748–1825

Painter

Beginnings.

The artist who was to revolutionize French painting in the later eighteenth century was born into a prosperous family that had long distinguished themselves as craftsmen and architects in Paris. The young David was related to the prominent painter François Boucher, and although his family wished David to be apprenticed to him, the elderly Boucher refused. Jacques-Louis came to learn his craft in the studio of Joseph-Marie Vien instead, and somewhat later he enrolled as a student at the Royal Academy. Each year, the institution held a competition for its prestigious Prix de Rome, an award that underwrote study in the ancient city, but David was to be rejected for the honor on three occasions, and as a result of the last rejection, he attempted suicide. On the fourth attempt, he finally won the prize and set off to Rome, but in the years that followed he came to harbor a vicious resentment of the artistic establishment in France. He arrived in Rome in 1775, and at the time was little impressed with the art of Antiquity. He struggled to find a way of reconciling his own interests as a painter with the growing popularity of the Neoclassical movement. But on this first journey to Rome, he seems to have spent more time studying the art of seventeenth-century Baroque painters than he did in the observation of antiquities. In particular, the art of the Italian master Guido Reni, as well as the historical paintings of the great French artist Nicholas Poussin, interested him. These works caused him to reject the highly ornamental character of Rococo and instead strive to create works that were an idealized representation of the natural world. After completing several commissions in Rome, he returned to France in 1780 with the intention of becoming a member of the Royal Academy.

Rising Fame.

As an institution affiliated with the crown, the Royal Academy had a long and venerable tradition of training artists, as well as establishing standards for those who worked for the king. When Louis XIV had founded the Academy in the second half of the seventeenth century, a special place had been given to the genre of historical painting, which French masters believed was the most difficult of all genres to capture in a suitably grand manner. To be accepted into the Academy, a painter had to demonstrate his abilities as an historical painter by undertaking a particularly difficult theme. To pass this test, Jacques-Louis David was to paint the subject of Belisarius Begging for Alms, a subject that had a special significance in the early 1780s. By this time the glory years of Louis XIV's reign were long gone, and France's government had by and large been bankrupted by a series of international wars. Its contemporary funding of the American Revolution, too, was another sore spot at the time, as royal finances seemed to be on an ever more perilous course. For decades, the thinkers of the French Enlightenment, the philosophes, had criticized the corruption of the monarchy and the arbitrary and capricious laws that governed the nation. The subject of Belisarius thus spoke to these dilemmas, for the story was about a prestigious ancient Byzantine general who had been destroyed through the corruption of the Emperor Justinian's state. Forced from the halls of power, he had been made to beg. Jacques-Louis David relied on his knowledge of Nicholas Poussin in the great work that he completed in 1781 to capture the moment when Belisarius is recognized by some of his former imperial associates. The painting has a simplicity and directness that was frequently missing in the academic art of the period, and the artist began to acquire a large stable of students, whom he was to keep busy on many large-scale projects over the coming years. Although Belisarius was a great painting, David's mastery over the genre of historical painting continued to grow, as can be seen in the Oath of the Horatii, a work completed in 1784. In the earlier Belisarius, David had intended to caution his viewers about the consequences of state corruption, while in this later canvas he presented a moral tale about the necessity of subverting one's individuality for the greater needs of the state. The painting depicts the moment at which the three sons of the ancient Latin poet swear allegiance to their father before heading off to fight for Rome.

David as Revolutionary.

With the onset of the French Revolution in 1789, the artist faced challenges as well as opportunities. Although he had long since been accepted into the Royal Academy, he had always bristled under its traditions and conventions, and with the rise of revolutionary sentiment he came to devote himself to the institution's abolition, an event that he and other artists were finally to achieve in 1793. He was not initially active as a revolutionary himself, but by 1790 he had joined the radical Jacobin club, and he soon painted the Oath of the Tennis Court, an image that immortalized the vow that members of the Third Estate had taken the year previously at Versailles after having been locked out of their assembly room. David's most influential Revolutionary picture, though, was his Death of Marat, a work that was immediately commissioned in the days that followed this revolutionary leader's assassination by Charlotte Corday in 1793. The work was publicly displayed and exercised a tremendously important emotional impact on the course of the Revolution during the height of terror. Often described as a "secular Pièta," David's Death of Marat remains one of the most powerful images of the Revolution. During these years, too, the artist played a major role by staging a number of revolutionary spectacles, and at the height of the Terror he was to provide history with a famous image of Queen Marie-Antoinette sketched on the tumbrel by which she approached the guillotine. As the Jacobins fell from favor, though, the artist was imprisoned on two separate occasions before being allowed to resume his life as an artist. As greater calm and stability returned to France, David's fortunes revived. He resumed his career as a painter and teacher, although some of his students now found his Neoclassicism out of touch with contemporary realities. He continued to receive many commissions, until the return of the Bourbon monarchy in 1815 forced him into exile in Belgium. He remained there for the rest of his life, continuing to paint the historical pictures and portraits for which he had long been famous.