Jacques-Louis David
Jacques-Louis David | |
|---|---|
 Self portrait of Jacques-Louis David, 1794, Musée du Louvre | |
| Born | Jacques-Louis David |
| Nationality (legal) | French |
| Known for | Painting, Drawing |
| Movement | Neoclassicism |
| Awards | Prix de Rome |
Jacques-Louis David (August 30, 1748 – December 29 1825) was a highly influential French painter in the Neoclassical style, considered to be the prominent painter of the era. In the 1780s his cerebral brand of history painting marked a change in taste away from Rococo frivolity toward a classical austerity and severity, chiming with the moral climate of the final years of the ancien régime.
David later became an active supporter of the French Revolution and friend of Maximilien Robespierre, and was effectively a dictator of the arts under the French Republic. Imprisoned after Robespierre's fall from power, he aligned himself with yet another political regime upon his release, that of Napoleon I. It was at this time that he developed his 'Empire style', notable for its use of warm Venetian colours. David had a huge number of pupils, making him the strongest influence in French art of the 19th century, especially academic Salon painting.
Early life
Jacques-Louis David was born into a prosperous family in Paris on August 30, 1748. When he was about nine his father was killed in a duel and his mother left him with his prosperous architect uncles. They saw to it that he received an excellent education at the Collège des Quatre-Nations, but he was never a good student: he had a facial tumor that impeded his speech, and he was always preoccupied with drawing. He covered his notebooks with drawings, and he once said, "I was always hiding behind the instructor’s chair, drawing for the duration of the class". Soon, he desired to be a painter, but his uncles and mother wanted him to be an architect. He overcame the opposition, and went to learn from François Boucher, the leading painter of the time, who was also a distant relative. Boucher was a Rococo painter, but tastes were changing, and the fashion for Rococo was giving way to a more classical style. Boucher decided that instead of taking over David’s tutelage, he would send David to his friend Joseph-Marie Vien, painter who embraced the classical reaction to Rococo. There David attended the Royal Academy, based in what is now the Louvre.
David attempted to win the Prix de Rome, an art scholarship to the French Academy in Rome, four times between 1770 and 1774; once, he lost according to legend because he had not consulted Vien, one of the judges. Another time, he lost because a few other students had been competing for years, and Vien felt David's education could wait for these other mediocre painters. In protest, he attempted to starve himself to death. Finally, in 1774, David won the Prix de Rome. Normally, he would have had to attend another school before attending the Academy in Rome, but Vien's influence kept him out of it. He went to Italy with Vien in 1775, as Vien had been appointed director of the French Academy at Rome. While in Italy, David observed the Italian masterpieces and the ruins of ancient Rome. David filled twelve sketchbooks with material that he would derive from for the rest of his life. While in Rome, he studied great masters, and came to favor above all others Raphael. In 1779, David was able to see the ruins of Pompeii, and was filled with wonder. After this, he sought to revolutionize the art world with the "eternal" concepts of classicism.
eat pork!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
The Revolution
In the beginning, David was a supporter of the Revolution, a friend of Robespierre and a member of the Jacobin Club. While others were leaving the country for new and greater opportunities, David stayed to help destroy the old order; he was a regicider who voted in the National Assembly for the Execution of Louis XVI. It is uncertain why he did this, as there were many more opportunities for him under the King than the new order; some people suggest David's love for the classical made him embrace everything about that period, including a republican government.
Others believed that they found the key to the artist's revolutionary career in his personality. Undoubtedly, David's artistic sensibility, mercurial temperament, volatile emotions, ardent enthusiasm, and fierce independence might have been expected to help turn him against the established order but they did not fully explain his devotion to the republican regime. Nor did the vague statements of those who insisted upon his "powerful ambition. . . and unusual energy of will” actually account for his revolutionary connections. Those who knew him maintained that "generous ardor", high-minded idealism and well meaning, though sometimes fanatical, enthusiasm rather than selfishness and jealousy, motivated his activities during this period.
Soon, David turned his critical sights on Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture. This attack was probably caused primarily by the hypocrisy of the organization and their personal opposition against his work, as seen in previous episodes in David’s life. The Royal Academy was chock full of royalists, and David’s attempt to reform it did not go over well with the members. However, the deck was stacked against this symbol of the old regime, and the National Assembly ordered it to make changes to conform to the new constitution.
David then began work on something that would later hound him: propaganda for the new republic. David’s painting of Brutus was shown during the play Brutus, by the famous Frenchman, Voltaire. The people responded in an uproar of approval. On June 20 1790, the anniversary of the first act of defiance against the King, the oath of the tennis court was celebrated. David was there wanting to commemorate the event in a painting, the Jacobins, revolutionaries that had taken to meeting in the Jacobin Monastery, decided that they would choose the painter whose "genius anticipated the revolution". David accepted, and began work on a mammoth canvas. The picture was never fully completed, because of its immense size (35ft. by 36ft.) and because people that needed to sit for it disappeared in the Reign of Terror, but several finished drawings exist and parts of the original canvas also exist showing nude figures with fully painted heads.
When Voltaire died in 1778, the church denied him a church burial, and his body was interred near a monastery. A year later, Voltaire’s old friends began a campaign to have his body buried in the Panthéon, as church property had been confiscated by the French Government. In 1791 David was appointed to head the organizing committee for the ceremony, a parade through the streets of Paris to the Panthéon. Despite rain, and opposition from conservatives based on the amount of money that was being spent, the procession went ahead. Up to 100,000 people watched the "Father of the Revolution" be carried to his resting place. This was the first of many large festivals organized by David for the republic. He went on to organize festivals for martyrs that died fighting royalists. These funerals echoed the religious festivals of the pagan Greeks and Romans and are seen by many as Saturnalian.
David incorporated many revolutionary symbols into these theatrical performances and orchestrated ceremonial rituals; in effect radicalizing the applied arts, themselves. The most popular symbol David was responsible for as propaganda minister, was drawn from classical Greek images; changing and transforming them with contemporary politics. In an elaborate festival held on the anniversary of the revolt that brought the monarchy to its knees, David’s Hercules figure was revealed in a procession following the lady Liberty (Marianne). Liberty, the symbol of Enlightenment ideals was here being overturned by the Hercules symbol; that of strength and passion for the protection of the Republic against disunity and factionalism.[1] In his speech during the procession, David “explicitly emphasized the opposition between people and monarchy; Hercules was chosen, after all, to make this opposition more evident”.[2] It was the ideals that David linked to his Hercules that single-handedly transformed the figure from a sign of the old regime into a powerful new symbol of revolution. “David turned him into the representation of a collective, popular power. He took one of the favorite signs of monarchy and reproduced, elevated, and monumentalized it into the sign of its opposite.”[3] Hercules, the image, became to the revolutionaries, something to rally around.
In 1791, the King attempted to flee the country and was within 30 miles (48 km) of the Swiss border when he had a hunger attack that led to his arrest and eventual execution. Louis XVI had made secret requests to Emperor Joseph II of Austria, Marie-Antoinette's brother, to restore him to his throne. This was granted and Austria threatened France if the royal couple were hurt. In reaction, the people arrested the King. This lead to an Invasion after the trials and execution of Louis and Marie-Antoinette. The Bourbon monarchy was destroyed by the French people in 1792—it would be restored after Napoleon, then destroyed again with the Restoration of the House of Bonaparte. When the new National Convention held its first meeting, David was sitting with his friends Jean-Paul Marat and Robespierre. In the Convention, David soon earned a nickname "ferocious terrorist". Soon, Robespierre’s agents discovered a secret vault of the king’s proving he was trying to overthrow the government, and demanded his execution. The National Convention held the trial of Louis XVI and David voted for the death of the King, which caused his wife, a royalist, to divorce him.
When Louis XVI was executed on January 21 1793, another man had already died as well — Louis Michel Le Peletier de Saint-Fargeau. Le Peletier was killed on the preceding day by a royal bodyguard, in revenge for having voted the death of the King. David was called upon to organize a funeral, and he painted Le Peletier Assassinated. In it the assassin’s sword was seen hanging by a single strand of horsehair above Le Peletier's body, a concept inspired by the proverbial ancient tale of the sword of Damocles, which illustrated the insecurity of power and position. This underscored the courage displayed by Le Peletier and his companions in routing an oppressive king. The sword pierces a piece of paper on which is written ‘I vote the death of the tyrant’, and as a tribute at the bottom right of the picture David placed the inscription ‘David to Le Peletier. 20 January 1793’. The painting was later destroyed by Le Peletier's royalist daughter, and is known only by a drawing, an engraving, and contemporary accounts. Nevertheless, this work was important in David's career, because it was the first completed painting of the French Revolution, made in less then three months, and a work through which he initiated the regeneration process that would continue with The Death of Marat, David's masterpiece.
On the 13th of July 1793, David's friend Marat was assassinated by Charlotte Corday with a knife she had hidden in her clothing. She gained entrance to Marat's house on the pretense of presenting him a list of people who should be executed as enemies of France. Marat thanked her and said that they would be guillotined next week upon which Corday immediately fatally stabbed him. She was guillotined shortly thereafter. Corday was of an opposing political party, whose name can be seen in the note Marat holds in David's subsequent painting, The Death of Marat. Marat, a member of the National Assembly and a journalist, had a skin disease that caused him to itch horribly. The only relief he could get was in his bath over which he improvised a desk to write his list of suspect counter-revolutionaries which were to be quickly tried and if convicted, guillotined. David once again organized a spectacular funeral, and Marat was buried in the Panthéon. Because Marat died in the bathtub, writing, David wanted to have his body submerged in the bathtub during the funeral procession. This did not play out because the body had begun to putrefy. Instead, Marat’s body was periodically sprinkled with water as the people came to see his corpse, complete with gaping wound. The Death of Marat, perhaps David's most famous painting, has been called the Pietà of the revolution. Upon presenting the painting to the convention, he said "Citizens, the people were again calling for their friend; their desolate voice was heard: David, take up your brushes.., avenge Marat... I heard the voice of the people. I obeyed." David had to work quickly, but the result was a simple and powerful image.
The Death of Marat, 1793 became the leading image of the Terror and immortalized both Marat, and David in the world of the revolution. This piece stands today as “a moving testimony to what can be achieved when an artist’s political convictions are directly manifested in his work".[4] A political martyr was instantly created as David portrayed Marat with all the marks of the real murder, in a fashion which greatly resembles that of Christ or his disciples.[5] The subject although realistically depicted remains lifeless in a rather supernatural composition. With the surrogate tombstone placed in front of him and the almost holy light cast upon the whole scene; alluding to an out of this world existence. “Atheists though they were, David and Marat, like so many other fervent social reformers of the modern world, seem to have created a new kind of religion.”[6] At the very center of these beliefs, there stood the republic.
After executing the King, war broke out between the new Republic and virtually every major power in Europe. David, as a member of the Committee of Public Safety, which was headed by Robespierre, contributed directly to the reign of Terror.[7] The committee was severe. Marie Antoinette went to the guillotine; an event recorded in a famous sketch by David. Portable guillotines killed failed generals, aristocrats, priests and perceived enemies. David organized his last festival: the festival of the Supreme Being. Robespierre had realized what a tremendous propaganda tool these festivals were, and he decided to create a new religion, mixing moral ideas with the republic, based on the ideas of Rousseau, with Robespierre as the new high priest. This process had already begun by confiscating church lands and requiring priests to take an oath to the state. The festivals, called fêtes, would be the method of indoctrination. On the appointed day, 20 Prairial by the revolutionary calendar, Robespierre spoke, descended steps, and with a torch presented to him by David, incinerated a cardboard image symbolizing atheism, revealing an image of wisdom underneath. The festival hastened the "Incorruptible's" downfall. Later, some see David’s methods as being taken up by Lenin, Mussolini and Hitler. These massive propaganda events brought the people together.
Soon, the war began to go well; French troops marched across Belgium, and the emergency that had placed the Committee of Public Safety in control was no more. Then, plotters seized Robespierre at the National Convention and was later guillotined; in effect ending the reign of terror. During this seizure, David yelled to his friend "if you drink hemlock, I shall drink it with you." After this, he supposedly fell ill, and did not attend the evening session because of "stomach pain", which saved him from being guillotined along with Robespierre. David was arrested and placed in prison. There he painted his own portrait, showing him much younger than he actually was, as well as that of his jailer.
Post Revolution
After David’s wife visited him in jail, he conceived the idea of telling the story of the Sabine Women. The Sabine Women Enforcing Peace by Running between the Combatants, also called The Intervention of the Sabine Women is said to have been painted to honor his wife, with the theme being love prevailing over conflict. The painting was also seen as a plea for the people to reunite after the bloodshed of the revolution.
This work also brought him to the attention of Napoleon. The story for the painting is as follows: "The Romans have abducted the daughters of their neighbors, the Sabines. To avenge this abduction, the Sabines attacked Rome, although not immediately—since Hersilia, the daughter of Tatius, the leader of the Sabines, had been married to Romulus, the Roman leader, and then had two children by him in the interim. Here we see Hersilia between her father and husband as she adjures the warriors on both sides not to take wives away from their husbands or mothers away from their children. The other Sabine Women join in her exhortations." During this time, the martyrs of the revolution were taken from the Pantheon and buried in common ground, and revolutionary statues were destroyed. When he was finally released to the country, France had changed. His wife managed to get David released from prison, and he wrote letters to his former wife, and told her he never ceased loving her. He remarried her in 1796. Finally, wholly restored to his position, he retreated to his studio, took pupils and retired from politics.
Napoleon
In one of history's great coincidences, David's close association with the Committee of Public Safety during the Terror resulted in his signing of the death warrant for one Alexandre de Beauharnais, a minor noble. De Beauharnais's widow, Rose-Marie Josèphe de Tascher de Beauharnais would later be known to the world as Joséphine Bonaparte, Empress of the French. It was her coronation by her husband, Napoleon I, that David depicted so memorably in the Coronation of Napoleon and Josephine, 2 December 1804.
David had been an admirer of Napoleon from their first meeting, struck by the then-General Bonaparte's classical features. Requesting a sitting from the busy and impatient general, David was able to sketch Napoleon in 1797. David recorded the conqueror of Italy's face, but the full composition of General Bonaparte holding the peace treaty with Austria remains unfinished. Napoleon had high esteem for David, and asked him to accompany him to Egypt in 1798, but David refused, claiming he was too old for adventuring and sending instead his student, Antoine-Jean Gros.
After Napoleon's successful coup d'etat in 1799, as First Consul he commissioned David to commemorate his daring crossing of the Alps. The crossing of the St. Bernard Pass had allowed the French to surprise the Austrian army and win victory at the Battle of Marengo on June 14 1800. Although Napoleon had crossed the Alps on a mule, he requested that he be portrayed "calm upon a fiery steed". David complied with Napoleon Crossing the Saint-Bernard. After the proclamation of the Empire in 1804, David became the official court painter of the regime.
One of the works David was commissioned for was The Coronation of Napoleon in Notre Dame. David was permitted to watch the event. He had plans of Notre Dame delivered and participants in the coronation came to his studio to pose individually, though never the Emperor (the only time David obtained a sitting from Napoleon had been in 1797). David did manage to get a private sitting with the Empress Josephine and Napoleon's sister, Caroline Murat, through the intervention of erstwhile art patron, Marshal Joachim Murat, the Emperor's brother-in-law. For his background, David had the choir of Notre Dame act as his fill-in characters. The Pope came to sit for the painting, and actually blessed David. Napoleon came to see the painter, stared at the canvas for an hour and said "David, I salute you". David had to redo several parts of the painting because of Napoleon's various whims, and for this painting, David received only 24,000 Francs.
Exile
After the Bourbons returned to power, David was on the list of proscribed former revolutionaries and Bonapartists, as he had voted for the execution of Louis XVI and probably had something to do with the death of Louis XVII. Mistreated and starved, Louis XVII had been forced to confess to an incestuous relationship, while in prison, with his mother, Marie-Antoinette. (This allegation helped to guillotine her, but it was a lie as Louis was separated from his mother and not allowed to see her.) The new Bourbon King, Louis XVIII, however, granted David amnesty and even offered him a position as a court painter. David refused this offer, preferring instead to seek a self-imposed exile in Brussels. There, he painted Cupid and Psyche and lived out the last days of his life quietly with his wife, whom he had remarried. During this time, he largely devoted his efforts to smaller-scale paintings of mythological scenes and to portraits of Bruxellois and Napoleonic emigres, such as the Baron Gerard.
His last great work, begun in 1822 and finished the year before his death, was a subject from Greek mythology, Mars Disarmed by Venus and the Three Graces. In December 1823, he wrote: "This is the last picture I want to paint, but I want to surpass myself in it. I will put the date of my 75 years on it and afterwards I will never again pick up my brush." The finished canvas—reminiscent in its limpid coloration of a painting on porcelain—was first shown in Brussels and then was sent to Paris, where David's former students flocked to see the painting. The exhibit managed to bring in after operating costs, 13,000 francs, meaning there were more than 10,000 visitors, a huge number for the time.
When David was leaving the theater, he was hit by a carriage and later died of deformations to the heart in December 29, 1825. After his death, some of his portrait paintings were sold at auction in Paris, where they sold for very small sums. His famous painting of Marat was shown in a special secluded room so as not to outrage the public. David’s body was not allowed to return to France, despite pleas of his family, because of David's part in the execution of Louis XVI and was therefore buried at Evere Cemetery, Brussels. His heart was buried at Père Lachaise, Paris.
Gallery
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The Lictors Bring to Brutus the Bodies of His Sons (1789), Musée du Louvre, Paris -
Portrait of Anne-Marie-Louise Thélusson, Comtesse de Sorcy (1790), Neue Pinakothek, Munich -
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Napoleon in His Study (1812), National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. -
Marguerite-Charlotte David (1813), National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. -
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The Comtesse Vilain XIIII and Her Daughter (1816), National Gallery, London
References
- Dowd, David, Pageant-Master of the Republic, Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press, (1948)
- Lindsay, Jack, Death of the Hero, London, Studio Books (1960)
- Brookner, Anita, Jacques-Louis David, Chatto & Windus (1980)
- Leymarie, Jean, French Painting, the 19th century, Cleveland (1962)
- Schnapper, Antoine, David témoin de son temps, Office du Livre, Fribourg, (1980)
- Delécluze, E., Louis David, son école et son temps, Paris, (1855) re-edition Macula (1983)
- Sahut, Marie-Catherine & Régis Michel, David, l'art et le politique éditions Gallimard-Découvertes et RMN Paris (1988)
- Bordes, Philippe, David, éd. Hazan, Paris (1988)
- Lévêque, Jean-Jacques, Jacques-Louis David édition Acr Paris (1989)
- Thévoz, Michel, Le théâtre du crime. Essai sur la peinture de David, éd. de Minuit, Paris (1989)
- Noël, Bernard, David, éd. Flammarion, Paris (1989)
- David contre David, actes du colloque au Louvre du 6-10 décembre 1989, éd. R. Michel, Paris (1993)
- Malvone, Laura, L'Évènement politique en peinture. A propos du Marat de David in Mélanges de l'Ecole française de Rome. Italie et Méditerranée 106, 1 (1994)
- Chodorow, Stanley, et al. The Mainstream of Civilization. New York: The Harcourt Press (1994) pg. 594
- Crow, Thomas, Emulation. Making artists for Revolutionary France, ed. Yale University Press, New Haven London (1995)
- Monneret, Sophie Monneret, David et le néoclassicisme, ed. Terrail, Paris (1998)
- Lajer-Burcharth, Ewa, Necklines. The art of Jacques-Louis David after the Terror, ed. Yale University Press, New Haven London (1999)
- Lee, Simon, David, ed. Phaidon, London (1999)
- Jacques-Louis David’s Marat, edited by William Vaughan & Helen Weston, Cambridge (2000)
- Rosenberg, Pierre, Prat, Louis-Antoine, Jacques-Louis David 1748-1825. Catalogue raisonné des dessins, 2 volumes, éd. Leonardo Arte, Milan (2002)
- Rosenberg, Pierre, Peronnet, Benjamin, Un album inédit de David in Revue de l'art, n°142 (2003-4), pp.45-83 (complete the previous reference)
- Vanden Berghe, Marc, Plesca, Ioana, Nouvelles perspectives sur la Mort de Marat: entre modèle jésuite et références mythologiques, Bruxelles (2004) / New Perspectives on David's Death of Marat, Brussels (2004) - online on www.art-chitecture.net/publications.php[1]
- Vanden Berghe, Marc, Plesca, Ioana, Lepelletier de Saint-Fargeau sur son lit de mort par Jacques Louis-David: saint Sébastien révolutionnaire, miroir multiréférencé de Rome, Brussels (2005) - online on www.art-chitecture.net/publications.php[2]
- The Death of Socrates, accessed 29 June 2005. New York Med.
- Jacques-Louis David, on An Abridged History of Europe, accessed 29 June 2005
- J.L. David on CGFA, accessed 29 June 2005
- Sainte-Fare Garnot, N., Jacques-Louis David 1748-1825, Paris, Ed. Chaudun (2005)
- Johnson, Dorothy,Jacques-Louis David. New Perspectives, Newark (2006)
- ^ Lynn Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2004), 97.
- ^ Lynn Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2004), 99.
- ^ Lynn Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2004), 103.
- ^ Albert Boime, Art in the Age of Revolution1750-1800 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1987), 454.
- ^ Robert Rosenblum, Transformations in Late Eighteenth Century Art. (Princeton New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1969), 83.
- ^ Robert Rosenblum and H.W. Janson, 19th-Century Art (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., Publishers, 1984), 30.
- ^ Albert Boime, Art in the Age of Revolution1750-1800 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1987), 442.
Filmography
Danton (A. Wajda, France, 1982) - Historical drama (many scenes including David as a silent character watching and drawing. Focuses on the period of the Terror).
See also
External links
- Web Gallery of Art
- Jacques-Louis David at Olga's Gallery
- Jacques-Louis David in the "History of Art"
- smARThistory: Death of Socrates
