Name: Jacques-Louis David
Dates: 1748-1825
Positions held: Napoleon I’s official painter from 1804
Academic training: between Rococo and Neoclassicism
Jacques-Louis David was born in 1748, into a middle class Parisian family. His mother, Marie-Geneviève, née Buron, came from a long line of master masons who were friends with painters and sculptors.
David was also related to the painter François Boucher, the favourite artist of Madame de Pompadour and an eminent exponent of Rococo (a high quality style, developed particularly under the reign of Louis XV, characterized by ornamental profusion and exaggeration). A famous 18th-century painter, François Boucher is especially well known for the grace and sensuality of his mythological and pastoral scenes.
David met François Boucher in 1764. Boucher entrusted him to Joseph-Marie Vien, a pioneer of the return to Classicism in painting, who introduced and developed a form of historical painting in which the details of the decor and architecture were inspired by archaeological finds (“Greek” taste). David was precocious and attended Vien’s lessons at the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture.
Lessons from Rome
It was only after presenting himself three times unsuccessfully for the Grand Prix de Rome, to complete his training in Italy, that David was accepted with his painting Antiochus and Stratonice, in 1774. He found his style during this stay in Rome, copying the masterpieces from Antiquity and the Italian masters. While there David trained in all techniques (black lead, red chalk, etc.) and discovered a new ideal of "classical" rigour.
His search for a new style as much as his academic research led him to compose large historical paintings. Some paintings exhibited at the Exhibition brought him recognition: notably Saint Roch Interceding with the Virgin for the Plague Striken (Marseille Fine Arts Museum), a large and majestic composition inspired by 17th-century Italian painting.
David returned to Paris in 1781 and exhibited Belisarius Begging for Alms (Louvre Museum), in which the influence of Nicolas Poussin can be observed. He emulated the structure and movement of ancient bas reliefs and friezes to tackle subjects marked by morality and death, with an intense theatricality. To celebrate his marriage to Charlotte Pécoul in 1783, he painted Andromache Mourning Hector (Louvre Museum).
Other ancient stories were his inspiration for many paintings which would make his reputation: The Oath of the Horatii (Louvre Museum), from 1785, made David the leading light of Neoclassicism, which flourished from 1750 to 1830. With this manifesto, he provided a template for the painting of his period: an historical painting of exemplary and rigorous composition, a work bearing the mark of Antiquity, a highly moral subject, a lesson in radical and inspired patriotism.
Neoclassicism distinguished itself from Rococo by rejecting "pleasing" and insubstantial subjects which were very popular at the time (mythological scenes as a pretext for charming nudes, feasts and pleasure…).
Drawing inspiration from Classical art, Neoclassical artists returned to the "grand style" of 17th-century French painters Poussin and Le Brun. In their work they combined knowledge of Greco-Roman art and the observation of nature reproduced with a new accuracy and sensitivity. It should also be added that Classical sources had increased as a result of the work of contemporary archaeologists (the discoveries of Pompeii and Herculaneum in 1710 and 1748 respectively), notably Winckelmann, with whom artists shared the aesthetic theory of the “ideal of beauty”. According to the historian Quatremère de Quincy, for young painters in the early 19th century, Neoclassicism seemed to be defined by the “noble simplicity and serene grandeur of Winckelmann”.
The Revolution
On the eve of the Revolution, David completed The Lictors Bring to Brutus the Bodies of His Sons. Behind the hero Brutus, the funeral procession can be seen. This painting extols Roman civic virtues in the spirit of the Enlightenment. During the Revolution, David was elected to parliament, appointed president of the Convention and even a member of the Committee of General Security under the Terror. The painter thereby passed from ancient history to national history. In 1790, he produced a large canvas commemorating the revolutionary event, the Tennis Court Oath (château of Versailles) on 20th June, 1789, by which the deputies of the Third Estate swore not to separate until they had settled the constitution of France.
David was one of the instigators of the abolition of the old Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture, in 1793. He painted three paintings celebrating the new martyrs for freedom: Le Pelletier de Saint Fargeau (1793), The Death of Marat (1793) and The Young Barra (1794, Calvet Museum, Avignon). He used iconographical codes from religious painting with startling effectiveness (Marat is depicted in his bath like a Christ on the cross).
The Directory
Following the fall of Robespierre, David was twice imprisoned in 1795. He then returned to Classical inspiration, producing The Rape of the Sabine Women (Louvre Museum). This painting, presented in 1799 as part of a paying exhibition, represents the peace established between the Romans and the Sabines. Calling for national reconciliation through imagery, the work echoes contemporary events, the repulsion at the Terror and the massacres. Shortly afterwards, David painted a series of half-body portraits including that of Madame Récamier (1800, Louvre Museum). He gives this turn-of-the-century society lady all the attributes of a new upper-class Roman citizen.
David and Napoleon
David admired First Consul and conquering general Napoleon Bonaparte. In 1801, his famous Bonaparte at the Grand-Saint-Bernard (Château de Malmaison) shows a national hero who has joined the legendary ranks of Hannibal and Charlemagne.
David was named the official painter on 18th December, 1805. Napoleon I used his painting as propaganda. David recounted the splendour of the new Imperial regime in his work. The Consecration of the Emperor Napoleon I and Coronation of the Empress Josephine in the Cathedral of Notre-Dame de Paris on 2nd December 1804 (Louvre Museum), completed in 1806, is one of the most symbolic works from this period, and a resplendent gallery of portraits.
David subsequently increasingly worked on this new Imperial iconography, as in 1812 through the painting The Emperor in his Study (National Gallery of Art, Washington), which celebrates Napoleon as a tireless worker. The last canvas of David’s seen by Napoleon was Leonidas at Thermopylae (Louvre Museum) produced between 1800 and 1814, a return to subjects Neoclassical morality and patriotism, whose conception harks back to The Rape of the Sabine Women.
Exiled to Brussels under the Restoration, between 1821 and 1824 David produced his last great work there, Mars being disarmed by Venus and the Graces (Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels) as well as numerous portraits.
David’s disciples
David ran the last of the great master’s studios in the history of Western painting. Their long tradition was born with the Renaissance and the Italian masters.
In the second half of the 18th century, a studio apprenticeship was one of the compulsory steps in painters’ academic training. David taught Anne-Louis Girodet in 1784, Antoine-Jean Gros in 1785, François Gérard in 1786 and Jean-Auguste Dominique Ingres in 1797. Their works combines the influence of their master and references to the tradition embodied by Raphael and Poussin.
The construction of a David-style aesthetic marked these pupils' work before the established themselves as official painters of the Empire. They all travelled to Rome, where they copied works from Antiquity. Girodet then broke away from David by seeking other models and tackling “terrible” subjects, contrary to the ideal imposed by his master.
Girodet worked with Gros whose work was also outside the academic criteria imposed by David. His work prefigures the 19th century, when a trip to Rome would no longer be considered fundamental to a career as an artist. Gérard, whose historical painting struggled at first to find buyers, became the official portrait artist to the French Imperial court.
Girodet, Gérard and Gros freed themselves from David’s teaching by also tackling literary subjects in their work.
Friends: François Boucher, Joseph-Marie Vien, Robespierre, Napoleon Bonaparte
A key work: Consecration of the Emperor Napoleon I (Louvre Museum)
