This article is taken from the February 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Get five issues for just £25.
Few artists have been as politically engaged as Jacques-Louis David (1748-1825) and even fewer have veered so startlingly in their convictions. His lifetime encompassed France’s most turbulent decades, spanning the ancien régime, the French Revolution, the Napoleonic adventure and the return of the Bourbons, that unlovely clan who famously, in the words attributed to Talleyrand, “learned nothing and forgot nothing”. David’s paintings tracked and, sometimes, helped shape each regime and shift.
Having trained with a distant relative, François Boucher, an artist whose rare facility for pink breasts and bottoms characterised the Rococo, he then stiffened the sinews of proto-revolutionaries in the 1780s with a series of paintings of Roman republican virtue. During the Revolution itself he was a signatory to the death warrant of Louis XVI and declared, after their first meeting, “Bonaparte is my hero.” And despite being a regicide, would go on to paint the imperial coronation. In exile after the fall of Napoleon, David retreated into mythologies as if the new banal and anti-heroic age simply were not happening.
It was a career that made him the most famous, the most influential and the most controversial painter in Europe. At the end of his life he wrote immodestly but truthfully: “I painted pictures that the whole of Europe came to study.”
This extraordinary personal and professional trajectory has been the subject of a major exhibition at the Louvre to mark the 200th anniversary of David’s death. With loans from Brussels, the Uffizi, the Metropolitan Museum in New York, The National Gallery of Art in Washington and a cluster of French museums, it contains almost all his major works — and two omissions, The Lictors Bring to Brutus the Bodies of His Sons (1789) and Le Sacre de Napoléon (“The Coronation”, 1807), can be seen in the galleries upstairs. The exhibition is a thrilling and unparalleled gathering of the work of an artist who recorded history in the making even as he took part in it.
Despite being the preeminent painter of high politics and high art, there was little in the young David to suggest what was to come. He entered the Prix de Rome — the Académie Royale’s painting competition that granted the winner a full bursary to study in Rome for three to five years — three times and failed on each occasion. His rejection in 1772 led him to lock himself in his room and go on hunger strike for a fortnight.
He finally won in 1774 and as he prepared to travel announced, “The Antique will not seduce me.” He couldn’t have been more wrong. Although the Louvre curators are keen to stress that the influence of Caravaggio was paramount on the young painter, the evidence confirms that the most lasting lessons he learned came from Poussin and Classical statuary. He quickly changed his tune: “To be a real artist,” he said, was “to proceed like the Ancients.”
In Rome, he filled sketchbook after sketchbook with what he saw — resources he would use as a stock of cut-and-paste motifs for the rest of his life. He also sent back the three canvases that made his reputation and brought the nascent style of Neoclassicism to instant perfection. The Oath of the Horatii (1786), The Death of Socrates (1787) and The Lictors Bring to Brutus the Bodies of his Sons (1789) were moral paintings, with a clear message from antiquity about the need for change in France. Each offered an exemplum virtutis about how self-sacrifice and fidelity to one’s country trumps both love for one’s family and love for one’s own life.
The government realised how subversive this message was and when the Brutus picture was exhibited — showing Lucius Junius Brutus grieving for the sons he had condemned to death for trying to overthrow the republic and restore the monarchy — the work was quickly banned. It regained its place on the Salon walls after a public outcry and was guarded by art students.
If the pictures offered moral admonitions in an increasingly febrile time, they offered too a visual template of figures immaculately rendered as a result of numerous figure and drapery studies, a mathematical rigidity, dramatic lighting and architecture that is as unadorned as their moral message. As David himself believed: “The way in which an idea is rendered and the manner in which it is expressed, is much more important than the idea itself.” His success in combining form and content was recognised by the philosophe and art critic Denis Diderot — for him the paintings showed the “severity, rigour and discipline of Sparta”.
When the Revolution broke out, David became its stage director and followed its path as it segued from idealism to bloodthirstiness to desuetude. He painted, for example, the great set piece of its early stage, the Tennis Court Oath of June 1789, where the members of the Third Estate vowed, in the face of the clergy and aristocracy, to establish a national constitution. The real deputies in their fervour pledged their vow using the outstretched arms he had introduced in The Oath of the Horatii.
The painting was never completed, and many of its main figures later fell to the guillotine, but a fragment fully 21 feet wide survives, depicting some of the participants as nude studies after the antique — these are buff politicians with not a paunch or inch of sagging flesh to be seen. David’s drawing, made for engraving, shows the whole scene as he envisaged it: the completed work would have been both overstuffed and overwhelming.
David remained ever-present when the Revolution turned bloody. He sided with the Jacobins and became a close friend of Robespierre, whose advocacy helped him to become both the deputy for Paris in the National Convention (later its president) and a member of the Committee of General Security, where he was put in charge of interrogations (including that of the infant Louis XVII) and was one of the men who signed the death warrant of Louis XVI. As a witness to the royal endgame, he drew a rapid sketch of Marie-Antoinette as she was wheeled through Paris on an open cart on her way to the guillotine.
This implacable hostility towards the monarchy won him the nickname the “ferocious terrorist”. During the “reign of terror”, he designed and supervised Robespierre’s revolutionary fêtes celebrating the triumph of the people and the cult of the Supreme Being and painted the Revolution’s heroic victim-martyrs.
Perhaps his greatest work is also his most unpleasant, The Death of Marat (1793), present in the exhibition in the original and with two full-scale copies by students forming a triptych. Here indeed David does borrow from Caravaggio to show the murdered Jean-Paul Marat as a Revolutionary pietà (see Books, page 63). Marat was deeply unpleasant, a radical journalist and leading figure in the Terror; he also had a skin ailment that meant he had to sit in a bath to cool his itchiness. It was there that the more moderate Girondin Charlotte Corday stabbed him to death.
In his picture, David included her deceitful letter of introduction in the dead man’s hand: “It is enough that I am truly unhappy to have a right to your kindness.” There is no sign here of Marat’s skin complaint, rather he is an unblemished martyr, a sculptural figure emerging from the sepulchral gloom in a painting that usurps the traditions of the Christian altarpiece. It is a brilliant piece of imaginative repurposing.
However, the revolution inevitably devoured its own children and his closeness to Robespierre nearly proved fatal. David had written to the “sea-green incorruptible”: “My friend, if you drink hemlock, I will drink hemlock with you”, and, when Robespierre fell, the painter was denounced in the Convention as “this usurper, this tyrant of the arts, as cowardly as he is blackguardly”. He escaped the guillotine by chance — he was ill, and his former colleagues could not convict him unless he was present in person — and was imprisoned at the requisitioned Luxembourg Palace instead. “My intentions were always pure,” he wailed.
After seven months incarceration, he was released, unchastened. He rose again with Napoleon, a man he viewed not as another tyrant but as the culmination of the Revolution’s work. “I shall slide into posterity in the shadow of my hero,” he wrote and became, with his pupil Antoine-Jean Gros, Bonaparte’s greatest propagandist.
A testament to his effectiveness. Napoleon Crossing the Alps (1801) was another spectacular sleight of hand. Bonaparte had in fact crossed the St Bernard Pass in 1800 in fine weather whilst being led on a mule, but he demanded that David portray him instead “calm on a fiery horse”.
Borrowing from, amongst other examples, Titian’s equestrian portrait of Charles V, Donatello’s bronze of the condottiere Gattamelata and the Marly Horses, David duly delivered a modern hero, idealised (Napoleon refused to sit for his portrait so David used a bust of him instead), the master of his men and of nature itself. The painting’s success was instant, and David and his studio were commissioned to produce four other versions.
In 1812, he depicted another side to the now omnipotent emperor. In The Emperor Napoleon in His Study at the Tuileries, he showed the father of the nation hard at work for the public good — the clock reads 12 minutes past four in the morning and Bonaparte is still in the uniform he hasn’t had time to change out of, his unified compendium of national law, the Code Napoléon, rolled up on his paper-strewn desk. Here is a leader as indefatigable and all-conquering in peace as in war.
As he had during the Revolution, the painter relished his closeness to power. When Pius VII came to Paris to oversee Napoleon’s coronation, David was commissioned to make his portrait too. “I admit I have long envied the great painters who preceded me for opportunities I thought I would never encounter,” he wrote. “But I will have painted an emperor and a pope!”
With the Restoration, David refused the offered amnesty and took himself to exile in Brussels. There he confined himself to portraits and mythologies that were an uncomfortable blend of his earlier Rococo and Neoclassical manners. His enormous Mars Being Disarmed by Venus (1824) shows how contemporary taste had had its fill of flinty political painting and wanted instead art for art’s sake.
The picture, with its readily signalled message about the need for peace, was also a teacher’s response to a student. David clearly had Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’ erotically charged Jupiter and Thetis (1811) in mind and was determined to show his former assistant (the young Ingres painted the candelabra in the exhibition’s most striking portrait) that he was still the master. But although he co-opted Ingres’ naked odalisques for his own Venus, his painting is horribly coy. When David put his art in the service of politics, he was a great painter; when it was merely for beauty’s sake, he was a lesser artist.
David died in Brussels in 1825 from injuries sustained when he was knocked down by a coach whilst returning from the theatre. The French art world he had once ruled had long since moved on. This wonderful exhibition puts him back in the city — and the building from which he had once lorded over it.
The Jacques-Louis David exhibition continues at the Louvre until 26 January.
