The 102 of Jacques-Louis David

This is a case where a comparison will give a good idea of how differently the same subject was handled by Jacques-Louis David and one of his numerous pupils. David started the portrait of Madame Récamier in 1800 which was never finished. (However, incidentally, this portrait helped a contemporary i...

Like

Buy

With the illness of 1820, David began to sense the end of his life and was determined to paint one last grand statement. In 1821 he began work on Mars Disarmed by Venus and the Three Graces. Completed in 1824, the work is bold, surprising and puzzling, and many people then and now have wondered exac...

Like

Buy

This painting can be regarded as David's finest work, in which he has perfectly succeeded in immortalizing a contemporary political event as an image of social ideals. David's painting of Marat represents the peak of his involvement in the Revolution where invention, style, fervent belief and devoti...

Like

Buy

David owed his rise to fame - after many reversals - to a painting for the execution of which he took his family to Rome, in order to absorb himself totally in the world of antique forms. It was The Oath of the Horatii. When he arrived to Rome, David rent a studio in the Via del Babuino. He worked i...

Like

Buy

David had begun the Leonidas at Thermopylae in 1798 as a companion piece to The Intervention of the Sabine Women. However, it was completed much later, in 1814. The subject concerns Leonidas, King of Sparta, who in 480 BC held the pass at Thermopylae against the invading Persian army of Xerxes. Vast...

Like

Buy

After the successful St Roch, David chose a subject from ancient history. The story of Belisarius was that of a loyal and successful general in the service of the Byzantine emperor Justinian. He had won major victories against the Vandals, Goths and Bulgarians, but he then became implicated in polit...

Like

Buy

This painting was exhibited at the salon of 1789, its full title was J Brutus, First Consul, returned to his house after having condemned his two sons who had allied themselves with the Tarquins and conspired against Roman liberty the lictors return their bodies so that they may be given burial. In ...

Like

Buy

David exhibited at the Salon of 1789 The Loves of Paris and Helen, an important private work for the Count d'Artois, the king's dissolute brother. David had begun work on the painting in 1786, but, due to a long illness it was not completed until 1788. The Loves of Paris and Helen was a work on a ne...

Like

Buy

David did paint Napoleon once more, in 1812, but this commission came from a most unexpected source. Britain and France had been at war since 1803 but such was the emperor's fame that a Scottish aristocrat, Alexander Douglas, later Duke of Hamilton, paid David the enormous sum of 1,000 guineas (18,6...

Like

Buy

In 1783, Andromache Mourning Hector was shown with about six other works at the Salon. One of these was the Christ on the Cross, painted for the Marshal de Noailles and his wife, Catherine Françoise Charlotte de Cosse-Brissac. Formerly a highly placed courtier with King Louis XV, and a military comm...

Like

Buy

This painting was made in (a lost) competition with David's rival, Pierre Peyron. Peyron's simple, noble and severe composition is known only from an engraving. David's work was turbulent, theatrical and lacking in gravity, giving no hint of Seneca's dignified and restrained suicide, forced on him b...

Like

Buy

At the approach of the French Revolution, when Greek and Roman civic virtues were extolled as salutary antidotes to the degeneracy of the Old Regime, David triumphed at the Salon with a succession of works, including this one, that gave clear expression to the moral and philosophical principles of h...

Like

Buy

Having painted relatively few works during the Revolution, David worked with great energy while in prison, possibly using painting as an escape and as tangible evidence that he was a painter and not a politician. A pupil brought painting equipment and materials as well as a mirror which enabled him ...

Like

Buy

David, ambitious and excitable, competed in 1771 for the Prix de Rome, which went to Suvée. In 1772 David lost out to Jombert and Le Monnier, and he nearly killed himself in despair. In 1773, his Seneca was passed over in favour of Peyron's more Poussin-like version. David finally won the prize in 1...

Like

Buy

With The Distribution of the Eagle Standards, David's official work for Napoleon ended, and now he undertook private commissions. The painting Sappho and Phaon was commissioned by the wealthy Russian diplomat and art collector Prince Nicolas Yusupov, who lived in Paris from 1808 to 1811. Sappho was ...

Like

Buy

When David was released from the Luxembourg prison at the end of December 1794, he became ill and so requested permission from the Convention to visit his wife's sister and her husband, Emilie and Pierre Sériziat, at their country house in Saint Ouen, near Tournan-en-Brie, about 32 km (20 miles) eas...

Like

Buy

In 1818 David painted The Farewell of Telemachus and Eucharis, a story of true lovers forced to part. Telemachus, son of Penelope and Odysseus, and Eucharis, one of the nymphs of the goddess Calypso, had an intense physical passion for one another but still remained pure and chaste because this phys...

Like

Buy

This portrait was probably commissioned through Madame Lavoisier, herself a painter and an ex-pupil of David. She is of at least equal importance with her husband in the composition, which celebrates the marriage of their minds through careful natural gestures and the recording of the chemical appar...

Like

Buy

While Pope Pius VII remained in Paris after the consecration, David also painted his portrait and thereby joined an illustrious band of past artists - Raphael, Titian and Velázquez - as the painter of a pontiff. David broke with protocol by sitting down while he worked, as previously tradition had d...

Like

Buy

When David was released from the Luxembourg prison at the end of December 1794, he became ill and so requested permission from the Convention to visit his wife's sister and her husband, Emilie and Pierre Sériziat, at their country house in Saint Ouen, near Tournan-en-Brie, about 32 km (20 miles) eas...

Like

Buy

The works young David produced for the Prix de Rome were in the decorative and rather playful style of the day, and gave few hints of the direction that his art would eventually take. In 1770 he was eliminated in the preliminary competition, and in 1771 he came second with The Combat of Mars and Min...

Like

Buy

In the first period of the Revolution, David continued to paint portraits of the cultivated upper classes and aristocracy. In 1790 he had painted the Marquise d'Orvilliers and the Countess de Sorcy, and around this time he also painted Madame Adelaide Pastoret, who, although of the upper class, is s...

Like

Buy

David showed two portraits at the Salon of 1783, one of his uncle Desmaisons, and the other of Doctor Alphonse Leroy. Leroy was an obstetrician, and probably attended Madame David at the birth of her first child. David shows him as an intelligent and refined man, dressed in fine clothes, writing at ...

Like

Buy

David's first history painting in exile was an extremely original and disturbing interpretation of the late antique myth of Cupid and Psyche. It was painted for the wealthy Italian patron and connoisseur Count Giovanni Battista Sommariva and, although planned in Paris, it was only finished in Brusse...

Like

Buy

David received a lucrative commission for a grand portrait of a Polish nobleman, Count Stanislas Potocki. Although begun in Rome, the painting was actually completed a little later in Paris. Potocki came from one of the most celebrated Polish families, and had recently become very wealthy thanks to ...

Like

Buy

Jacques-Louis David distinguished himself in France both as a painter and as a political figure, actively participating in the Revolution and later becoming Napoleon's court artist. After Napoleon's fall David went into exile in Brussels where he died. Although David made his name with large heroic ...

Like

Buy

In 1816, David painted the tender portrait of the Comtesse Vilain XIII and her Daughter. The 36-year-old comtesse had formerly been lady-in-waiting to the empress Marie Louise and had held Napoleon's son, the king of Rome, at his christening in 1811. Her husband, Philippe Vilain XIIII, had been the ...

Like

Buy

'Only the French', declared the Convention's leader, Robespierre, 'have thirteen-year-old heroes.' This distinctly dubious compliment referred to the boy Joseph Bara, who disguised himself as a hussar in order to accompany Republican troops against rebel forces. News of his death reached Paris late ...

Like

Buy

Jacques-Louis David painted the story, when the women intervene to reconcile the warring parties. The Sabine Women Enforcing Peace by Running Between the Combatants (also known as The Intervention of the Sabine Women ) was completed in 1799. It is in the Louvre Museum. David had worked on it from 17...

Like

Buy