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Jacques-Louis David
Quick Facts
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NAME: Jacques-Louis David
OCCUPATION: Painter
BIRTH DATE: August 30, 1748
DEATH DATE: December 29, 1825
EDUCATION: Collège des Quatre-Nations
PLACE OF BIRTH: Paris, France
PLACE OF DEATH: Brussels, Netherlands
Best Known For
Jacques-Louis David was the most celebrated French artist of his day, considered to be the preeminent painter
of the 18th-century Neoclassical period.
Jacques-Louis David Biography
Synopsis
Jacques-Louis David was the most celebrated
French artist of his day, considered to be the
preeminent painter of the 18th-century Neoclassical
period. As an artist during the French Revolution,
his painting moved away from the ornate and
playful Rococo style to a more serious and austere
approach. He has many students, and therefore
wield great influence over French art during his
lifetime.
(born Aug. 30, 1748, Paris—died Dec. 29, 1825,
Brussels) the most celebrated French artist of his
day and a principal exponent of the late 18thcentury Neoclassical reaction against the Rococo
style.
Formative years
David won wide acclaim with his huge canvases on
classical themes (e.g., Oath of the Horatii, 1784).
When the French Revolution began in 1789, he
served briefly as its artistic director and painted its
leaders and martyrs (The Death of Marat, 1793) in a
style that is more realistic than classical. Later he
was appointed painter to Napoleon. Although
primarily a painter of historical events, David was
also a great portraitist (e.g., Portrait of Mme
Récamier, 1800).
David was born in the year when new excavations
at the ash-buried ruins of Pompeii and Herculaneum
were beginning to encourage a stylistic return to
antiquity (without being, as was long supposed, a
principal cause of that return). His father, a small
but prosperous dealer in textiles, was killed in a
duel in 1757, and the boy was subsequently raised,
reportedly not very tenderly, by two uncles. After
classical literary studies and a course in drawing, he
was placed in the studio of Joseph-Marie Vien, a
history painter who catered to the growing GrecoRoman taste without quite abandoning the light
sentiment and the eroticism that had been
fashionable earlier in the century. At age 18, the
obviously gifted budding artist was enrolled in the
school of the Royal Academy of Painting and
Sculpture. After four failures in the official
competitions and years of discouragement that
included an attempt at suicide (by the stoic method
of avoiding food), he finally obtained, in 1774, the
Prix de Rome, a government scholarship that not
only provided a stay in Italy but practically
guaranteed lucrative commissions in France. His
prize-winning work, Antiochus and Stratonice,
reveals that at this point he could still be influenced
slightly by the Rococo charm of the painter Franois
Boucher, who had been a family friend.
In Italy there were many influences, including those
of the dark-toned 17th-century Bolognese school,
the serenely classical Nicolas Poussin, and the
dramatically realistic Caravaggio. David absorbed
all three, with an evident preference for the strong
light and shade of the followers of Caravaggio. For
a while he seemed determined to fulfill a prediction
he had made on leaving France: “The art of
antiquity will not seduce me, for it lacks liveliness .
. . .” But he became interested in the Neoclassical
doctrines that had been developed in Rome by,
among others, the German painter Anton Raphael
Mengs and the art historian Johann Joachim
Winckelmann. In the company of Quatremre de
Quincy, a young French sculptor who was a strong
partisan of the return to antiquity, he visited the
ruins of Herculaneum, the Doric temples at
Paestum, and the Pompeian collections at Naples. In
front of the ancient vases and columns, he felt, he
said later, that he had just been “operated on for
cataract of the eye.”
Rise to fame: 1780–94
Back in Paris in 1780, he completed and
successfully exhibited Belisarius Asking Alms, in
which he combined a nobly sentimental approach to
antiquity with a pictorial technique reminiscent of
Poussin. In 1782 he married the spirited Marguerite
Pécoul, whose father was a wealthy building
contractor and the superintendent of construction at
the Louvre—a position that carried considerable
influence. From this date David prospered rapidly.
The pathos and painterly skill of Andromache
Mourning Hector brought him election to the
Académie Royale in 1784; and that same year,
accompanied this time by his wife and studio
assistants, he returned to Rome with a commission
to complete a painting that appears to have been
originally inspired by a Paris performance of Pierre
Corneille's Horace. The result, finally not based on
any of the incidents in the play, was the Oath of the
Horatii. The subject is the solemn moment, charged
with stoicism and simple courage, when the three
Horatii brothers face their father and offer their
lives to assure victory for Rome in the war with
Alba; the pictorial treatment—firm contours, bare
cubic space, sober colour, frieze-like composition,
and clear lighting—is as austerely non-Rococo as
the subject. Exhibited first in David's studio in
Rome and then, following his return to France, in
the official Paris Salon of 1785, the picture created
a sensation; it was regarded as a manifesto for an
artistic revival (the term Neoclassicism was not yet
in use) that would cure Europe of the lingering
addiction to dainty curves and boudoir themes.
Eventually, it came to be regarded, although such
was almost certainly not the first intention, as a
manifesto for an end to the corruption of an effete
aristocracy and for a return to the stern, patriotic
morals attributed to republican Rome.
David became a culture hero; he was even referred
to in some quarters as a messiah. He added to his
fame by producing in 1787 the morally uplifting
Death of Socrates, in 1788 the less uplifting but
archaeologically interesting Paris and Helen, and in
1789 another lesson in self-sacrifice, The Lictors
Bringing to Brutus the Bodies of His Sons. By the
time the Brutus was on view, the French Revolution
had begun, and this picture of the patriotic Roman
consul who condemned his traitorous sons to death
had an unanticipated political significance. It also
had, through its presumably accurate reconstitution
of the details of everyday Roman life, an effect that
was perhaps equally unexpected, for with it David
began the long and extensive influence he was to
have on French fashions. Up-to-date homes began
to display imitations of his Roman furniture; men
cut their hair short in the Roman style; and women
adopted the dresses and the coiffures of Brutus'
daughters. Later on
, even the flimsy Sabine dress, which left the breasts
exposed, was adopted by the ultramodern.
In the early years of the Revolution, David was a
member of the extremist Jacobin group led by
Robespierre, and he became an energetic example
of the politically committed artist. He was elected to
the National Convention in 1792, in time to vote for
the execution of Louis XVI. By 1793, as a member
of the art commission, he was virtually the art
dictator of France and was nicknamed “the
Robespierre of the brush.” He preached moral and
aesthetic sermons to the Convention:“The artist
must be a philosopher. Socrates the skilled sculptor,
Jean-Jacques [Rousseau] the good musician, and the
immortal Poussin, tracing on the canvas the sublime
lessons of philosophy, are so many proofs that an
artistic genius should have no other guide except the
torch of reason.”
Guided supposedly by the torch of reason and
perhaps also by bitter memories of his many
unsuccessful attempts to win the Prix de Rome, he
succeeded in abolishing the Académie Royale and
with it much of the old regime's system for training
artists and providing them with patronage. The
Académie was replaced briefly by a body called the
Commune des Arts, then by a group called the
Popular and Republican Society of the Arts, and
then, finally, in 1795, after David was out of power,
by the beginning of the system—a combination of
the Institut de France and the cole des Beaux-Arts—
that dominated French artistic life during most of
the 19th century.
As an artist during these years of his dictatorship,
David was frequently busy with revolutionary
propaganda. He had commemorative medals struck,
set up obelisks in the provinces, and staged national
festivals and the grandiose funerals the new
government gave its martyrs. Some of his projects
for paintings at this time were never completely
carried out: one of these is the unfinished Joseph
Bara, which is a tribute to a drummer boy shot by
the royalists, and another is the sketched Oath of the
Tennis Court, which was to commemorate the
moment in 1789 when the Third Estate (the
commoners) swore not to disband until a new
constitution had been adopted. The Death of
Lepeletier de Saint-Fargeau, painted to honour a
murdered deputy and regarded by David as one of
his best pictures, was eventually destroyed. The
result of all this is that the artist's Jacobin
inspiration is represented principally by The Death
of Marat, painted in 1793 shortly after the murder
of the revolutionary leader by Charlotte Corday.
This “piet of the Revolution,” as it has been called,
is generally considered David's masterpiece and an
example of how, under the pressure of genuine
emotion, Neoclassicism could turn into tragic
Realism.
Later years: 1794–1825
In 1794, after his friend Robespierre had been sent
to the guillotine, David was arrested. At his trial he
is said
to have defended himself badly, mumbling that in
the future he intended to attach himself “to
principles and not to men.” He was imprisoned
twice, for four months in 1794 and for two more the
next year, apparently most of the time in the not
uncomfortable Palais du Luxembourg in Paris. He
was consoled by being allowed to paint and also by
the fact that his wife, who had divorced him two
years earlier for having voted for the death of the
King, now loyally returned in his hour of trouble
and remarried him, on this occasion for good.
During his first period in prison, he painted from his
window his only landscape, the View of the
Luxembourg Gardens. While he was held
temporarily in another Paris building, he did an
unfinished self-portrait. At 46 he appears as a
boyish young man with romantically disheveled
hair, brown eyes, and a generally aggressive, if
worried, look; a cheek tumour from which he
suffered all of his adult life and which is said to
have impeded his speech gives his face a slight
twist.
Even during his imprisonment, he had retained three
studios in the Louvre, and, after the amnesty of
1795, he devoted to teaching the same energy he
had been devoting to revolutionary politics.
Eventually, in the interval between his painting of
Oath of the Horatii and Napoleon's defeat at the
Battle of Waterloo, he was responsible for the
training and indoctrination of hundreds of young
painters from all over Europe, among them such
future masters as Franois Gérard, Antoine-Jean
Gros, and Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. The
indoctrination began with the premise that the basis
of art was the contour, and so it can be held partly
responsible for the excessive emphasis on drawing
that characterized European academic painting in
the 19th century. But David himself, as his works
show, was not always hostile to rich chromatic
effects; as late as 1860 he could be called, by no
less a colourist than Eugne Delacroix, “the father of
the whole modern school.”
Neoclassicism was presumably inclined to scorn
portraiture, because a contemporary sitter would
normally lack both the universality and the nudity
of an ancient statue. David, however, had done
portraits, remarkable for their psychological
individuality and their look of solid flesh, since the
beginning of his career: in 1782–83 his sitter had
been Alphonse Leroy, a Paris medical professor; in
1784 Mme Pécoul, his mother-in-law; in 1788 the
chemist Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier, with Mme
Lavoisier. In 1795 the freed artist portrayed his
pretty, elegant sister-in-law, Mme Sériziat, and her
dandyish husband. In 1800 he produced his famous
period piece, Portrait of Mme Récamier, which he
left unfinished because the sitter, then at the start of
her career as a reigning Paris beauty, proved
unreliable about hours for posing.
But David was not a man for the life of a mere
teacher and portraitist. In 1799 he made a
spectacular reentry into public notice with a new
giant canvas, The Intervention
of the Sabine Women. The picture, often mistakenly
referred to as The Rape of the Sabines, represents
the moment, a few years after the legendary
abduction, when the women, now contented wives
and mothers, halt a battle between their Roman
husbands and the Sabine men who have come on an
unwanted rescue mission; in the middle of the
melee stands the lovely Sabine woman Hersilia,
appealing with one arm toward the Roman Romulus
and the other toward the bearded Sabine Tatius. The
artist had said that his aim was to move away from
the allegedly crude Roman manner of the Oath of
the Horatii into a more graceful Greek manner, and
he did win enthusiastic applause for the elegance of
his figures. He also won some approval for his
supposed intention to preach conciliation after 10
years of bloodletting in France. But he attracted
Roy Donald McMullen
perhaps the most attention with the nakedness of his
ancient warriors; having ceased to be the
Robespierre of the brush, he now became, in a
popular jingle, “the Raphael of the sansculottes” (
i.e., the Raphael of the radical Republicans).
Napoleon admired The Intervention of the Sabine
Women and saw possibilities for selfaggrandizement in the talent displayed. Soon David,
without acquiring political office, was again a
government painter, first under the Consulate and
then, after 1804, under the Empire. He was not,
however, the only prominent Frenchman to move
from the Jacobin left to the Bonapartist right, and he
had evidently always been a worshiper of historical
heroes. His most important Napoleonic work is the
huge Coronation of Napoleon in Notre-Dame
(1805–07), sometimes called Napoleon Crowning
the Empress Josephine; in it Neoclassicism gives
way to a style that combines the official portraiture
of the old French monarchy with overtones—and
occasional straight imitation—of the masters of the
Italian Renaissance. This picture was followed in
1810 by the large Napoleon Distributing the Eagles
and in 1812 by The Emperor Napoleon in His Study
at the Tuileries, a sharply perceptive portrait
notwithstanding its conspicuously propagandistic
intention.
After the fall of Napoleon in 1815, David was
exiled to Brussels. Cut off from the excitement and
stimulus of the great events he had lived through, he
lost much of his old energy. Toward the end of his
life, he executed, probably with considerable help
from a Belgian pupil, Franois-Joseph Navez, one
more remarkably convincing portrait: The Three
Women of Ghent.
" Jacques-Louis David." 2011. Biography.com 21 Dec 2011, 09:29 http://www.biography.com/people/jacques-louisdavid-9267043