David

David, son of a haberdasher, was an orphan at the age of six. He was raised by his maternal uncles who encouraged his taste for drawing. After decent secondary schooling he began to study painting under the direction of Joseph Marie Vien., the most celebrated historical painter of his time, to whom he had been recommended by the painter Francois Boucher, a distant relative. Admitted as a student to the Royal Academy of Painting, he won the prize of Rome only at the age of twenty six.

The following year he left for Rome, together with Vien, newly named director of the French Academy. During his stay of five years in the city of the popes (1775-1780) David drew in the manner of the renaissance masters and the earlier artists, as well as studying seventeenth century painting. When he returned to France his repertoire had been enriched with shapes and subjects which he continued to consult during his entire career.

His esthetic conceptions were already clearly expressed in the Belisarius (1780), then in the Grief of Andromache, his reception piece for the Academy. Having received an order for a historical painting for the king, he decided to return to Rome to execute the order. Out of this second visit to Rome (1784-5) came the Oath of the Horatii, which was greeted at the Salon of 1785 as the manifesto of the neoclassical school.

In 1789 David was on fire for the revolution. He came to play an important part in French artistic life, notably in attacking the Academy of Painting, the suppression of which he inspired at the Convention in August of 1793. Chosen a deputy to that same assembly he became an influential member of the Committee of Public Instruction. King killer and member of the Mountain, he entered the Committee of General Safety. On him fell the task of organizing the revolutionary festivals; he was charged with immortalizing the martyrs. His Death of Marat is regarded as his masterpiece, along with the Death of Le Pelletier de Saint-Fargeau, which unfortunately has disappeared.

His political activity and the rush of events prevented him from finishing The Oath of the Tennis Court, which would have been the grandiose expression in the ancient style of a contemporaneous event. Briefly imprisoned after the fall of Robespierre, he again became active as a painter.

At that time he painted some portraits and began the Rape of the Sabines, which he finished in 1799.

David was a great admirer of Napoleon and joined him quite early. He was Napoleon's main painter and from then on devoted all his talent to serving the glory of his new master. In the 1801 Crossing the Great St, Bernard he represented the first consul in a prodigious allegory as a hero crossing the Alps on a rearing horse. Other paintings included a portrait of Mme Recamier and a self-portrait.

In 1812 he produced the portrait of Napoleon standing in his office in the Tuileries. Napoleon charged him with commemorating in enormous compositions the ceremonies of the imperial regime. The size of the task limited him to finishing the Sacre (1806-8) and the Distribution of the Eagles (1810), two oils with a realism of detail submerged in a grandiose arrangement. None the less, he did not abandon antiquity. In 1814 he finished the Leonidas at Thermopylae begun fifteen years earlier as a companion to the Sabines. Passing from the history of Rome to that of Greece, David did his best to reach in these two monumental works the purest sources of antiquity, as well in the plan and execution of the drawing as in the moral content.

After remaining faithful to Napoleon during the Hundred Days, he was forced by the return of Louis XVIII after Waterloo into exile in Brussels, where he died on December 29, 1825. The king-killer was still so hated that his relatives were forbidden to return his body to France.

The last stage of his career was marked by numerous portraits, some of them of dazzling workmanship, like that 1817 one of Sieyes. On the other hand his works inspired by mythology such as the great canvas of Mars disarmed by Venus and the Graces had only a meager success. The painting astonishes by the extreme audacity of the colors and the intrusion of realism into the ideal. Thus in the way of an artistic testament David took up again his old attempts to reconcile drawing and color.