Jacques-Louis David

The supreme painter of the French Revolution and the figure who more than anyone else established the visual language of French Neoclassicism. David studied at the Royal Academy in Paris, won the Prix de Rome on his fifth attempt in 1774, and spent five formative years in Rome studying the antique and the Renaissance. He returned to Paris as a convert to the idea that painting should recover the formal clarity and moral severity of ancient Rome — and arrived just as France was about to live out the Roman republican drama he had been studying. The Oath of the Horatii (1784) appeared at the Salon two years before the Revolution began, and its image of three brothers swearing to die for Rome against a background of geometrical severity felt, to contemporaries, like an image drawn from the present. During the Revolution David was a member of the National Convention, voted for the execution of Louis XVI, and became effectively the Revolution's art director: he organized public festivals, directed the destruction of royal monuments, and produced in The Death of Marat (1793) the most powerful image of political martyrdom in Western art. He survived the Terror and was imprisoned briefly after Thermidor, and reemerged under Napoleon as the empire's official painter — producing Napoleon Crossing the Alps (1801) and the enormous Coronation of Napoleon (1807) that was so pleasing to the Emperor that he reportedly lifted his hat to the artist at the Salon. After Napoleon's fall, David was exiled under the Restoration as a regicide and spent his last years in Brussels, where he continued painting until his death in 1825. His influence on French academic painting, transmitted through hundreds of students including Ingres and Gros, was total and lasted most of the 19th century.