DAVID, JACQUES-LOUIS (1748–1825)

DAVID, JACQUES-LOUIS (1748–1825), French painter. David was born in Paris to a middle-class family of merchants. He was related to the famous rococo painter François Boucher (1703–1770). He attended the Collège des Quatre Nations and studied art with the neoclassical painter Joseph-Marie Vien at the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture. As a student, David lived in the Louvre with his tutor, Michel Sedaine, who was secretary of the Royal Academy of Architecture in addition to being a playwright. Through Sedaine, David came into contact with Enlightenment intellectuals such as Denis Diderot (1713–1784) who influenced his aesthetic development and ideas. David won the coveted Roman fellowship prize the Prix de Rome in 1774 and lived and studied at the French Academy in Rome until 1779. In Rome he interacted with an international community of artists and intellectuals as he studied history, aesthetics, anatomy, and perspective. He drew extensively from antique sculpture as well as celebrated Renaissance and baroque religious paintings and sculptures that he encountered in churches in Rome and numerous other Italian cities.

Through Vien, who had become director of the French Academy in Rome, David received his first major commission, to paint St. Roch Interceding for the Plague-Stricken (1780–1781), a monumental religious work made for the chapel of the plague hospital in Marseilles and exhibited with great success at the Paris Salon of 1781. He followed this with another monumental religious painting, Christ on the Cross, commissioned by the Maréchale de Noailles and exhibited at the Salon of 1782. Although David, like his contemporaries, prepared for a career in which religious commissions would be expected, aesthetic developments and political events led him to represent primarily antique themes and contemporary history.

Influenced by the neoclassical movement in art and culture, toward the end of his fellowship in Rome David executed a monumental drawing, a frieze in the antique style, depicting the Funeral of a Hero (1778–1780). The contour style and emphasis on corporeal expression that dominate this composition became the hallmark of his great masterpieces of the 1780s. Works that were acclaimed at the Salon exhibitions in Paris include Belisarius Receiving Alms (1781), Andromache Mourning Hector (1783), and the Oath of the Horatii (1784–1785). The Oath, which David painted on a return visit to Rome in 1784, with its depiction of heroic and powerful human figures naturalistically rendered and its emphasis on gesture and corporeal form, transformed French and European art. David was a philhellene and in the 1780s became part of the intellectual circle of the Trudaine brothers, owners of one of the largest classical libraries in Europe. Inspired by Plato's writings, in 1787 David painted the complex and meditative Death of Socrates for Michel Trudaine de la Sablière. Due to illness he did not complete its pendant, the Love of Paris and Helen, until 1789. Both of these paintings had a direct impact on the development of romantic Hellenism in French art.

David's monumental The Lictors Returning to Brutus the Bodies of his Sons was exhibited at the Salon of 1789 shortly after the beginning of the Revolution. The problematics and ambiguities of this work, which questions the morality of politics when it conflicts with the family sphere, were forgotten during the early 1790s when the painting was understood as an exemplum of personal and familial sacrifice for the good of the country. David embraced the cause of the Revolution and the Republic, serving as a deputy to the national convention from 1792 to 1794. During this time he planned, promoted, and organized revolutionary festivals and funerals, designing temporary monuments, costumes, and emblems for these vast parades. He also contributed paintings to the revolutionary cause, including a large-scale sketch for The Oath of the Tennis Court (1791, never executed due to political vicissitudes), and to the martyrs of revolution, Lepelletier de St. Fargeau (1793) and The Death of Marat (1793), which became an icon of the Revolution, and Bara (1794).

In 1794 and again in 1795 David was imprisoned for his political role, and there began work on his next monumental history painting, the Intervention of the Sabine Women (1799), a remarkable encomium to the heroic women who ensured the founding of Rome by rushing onto the battlefield with their infants and children in order to end an internecine war between the Romans and the Sabines. Its pendant, Leonidas at Thermopylae (1814), represents the king of Sparta and his private army of three hundred men about to give up their lives by defending the pass at Thermopylae against the vast Persian army, thereby ensuring victory for the Greeks. Together, these works constitute a meditation on the precarious enterprise of founding and preserving Western civilization.

As Napoleon rose to power he called upon David to promote his heroic image and the ceremonies of empire. After painting the great equestrian portrait of Bonaparte Crossing the Alps (1800) David was named first painter to the emperor (1804) and completed two of four vast compositions, The Coronation of the Emperor Napoleon I (1806–1807) and the Distribution of the Eagles (1810). The Coronation commemorates the event during which Napoleon established himself as emperor and inaugurated his newly appointed court. David depicted himself along with family and friends as spectators but also lavished attention on the pope and his retinue at the crossing of Notre Dame Cathedral. In the Distribution of the Eagles David reveals his growing dissatisfaction with the empire by depicting the emperor as a diminutive figure and emphasizing the energy and vitality of the armies over Napoleon himself.

When Louis XVIII became king in 1816, thereby restoring the Bourbons after Napoleon's fall, David was sent into exile in Brussels along with many fellow regicides who had voted for the death of Louis XVI in 1792. While in Brussels, David created a series of monumental mythological paintings that constitute a new direction in his art and are among the most surprising—and strange—works of his entire career. Using stylistic and compositional innovations, David explored the complex psychology of love, eros, and eroticism in Amor and Psyche (1817), The Farewell of Telemachus and Eucharis (1818), The Anger of Achilles (1819), and Mars Disarmed by Venus and the Graces (1824). In these works, continuing a trend begun early in his career, David was inspired by multiple literary and visual sources but created new subjects or episodes that differed from precedents.

In exile David continued to paint portraits, creating masterpieces of the genre in such works as Sieyès (1817), Madame Morel de Tangry and her Daughters (c. 1820), and Zénaïde and Charlotte Bonaparte (1821). In these penetrating works David continued his exploration of the psychology of personality begun in portraits completed at the height of his earlier career, such as the famous Lavoisier and His Wife (1788), Pope Pius VII (1805), and Napoleon in his Study (1812), among many others.

David was celebrated as a dedicated teacher and trained vast numbers of students, including some of the major artists of the early nineteenth century such as Antoine-Jean Gros, François-Pascal-Simon Gérard, Anne-Louis Girodet de Roucy, Jean-Auguste-Dominic Ingres, and the sculptor Pierre-Jean David d'Angers.

DAVID, JACQUES-LOUIS (1748–1825)

BIBLIOGRAPHY