Jacques Louis David

Jacques Louis David was born in Paris in 1748 and trained with Joseph-Marie Vien. After winning the Prix de Rome in 1774, he went to Rome to study ancient sculpture and Renaissance painting. Back in France, he made his name with The Oath of the Horatii of 1784 and became the leader of Neoclassicism. David's pictures are built with rigorous compositions and crisp contours, their figures as solemn as those of an ancient relief, and they draw on stories of heroism and virtue from Greek and Roman history. The Death of Socrates shows the philosopher calmly reaching for the cup of hemlock while he speaks to his disciples about the immortality of the soul. The portrait of Antoine Laurent Lavoisier and Marie Anne Lavoisier, painted the following year, brings the same Neoclassical clarity to portraiture and celebrates the scientific partnership of the chemist and his wife. During the French Revolution David threw himself into politics: he was elected to the National Convention, voted for the execution of Louis XVI and painted The Death of Marat. Imprisoned for a time after the fall of Robespierre, he later became Napoleon's first painter and produced vast works such as The Coronation of Napoleon. After the restoration of the Bourbons he went into exile in Brussels, where he died in 1825. His pupils, among them Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres and Antoine-Jean Gros, carried his influence deep into nineteenth-century French painting.