At the Salon of 1783, David showed Frieze in the Antique Style, a grisaille strip seven feet long (subsequently cut into two pieces) depicting the death and funeral procession of an antique hero and in 1791, The Oath of the Tennis Court, a teeming image of the moment the Revolution flared into life.ĭavid’s thinking behind their public showing was pragmatic: the first, for the ambitious 35-year-old, was to announce the new classical manner, forged in Rome, with which he was about to remake contemporary French painting and the second, for the de facto official painter of the Revolution, was an advertisement meant to attract donations for a huge canvas of this foundational moment to be hung in the National Assembly. Nevertheless, only two of his drawings had previously been exhibited in public. Photo: Jean-Luc Lacroix City of Grenoble/Musée de Grenoble ‘It will be easy,’ he wrote, ‘to follow step by step, in these studies, the progress of the one who raised the school rather suddenly from a mannered and languid style to a rigour and a purity worthy of the great masters of Italy.’ These, then, were not just works of art but historical documents.įrieze in the Antique Style: Death of a Hero (1780), Jacques-Louis David. More than 2,000 of them were included in the sale of his estate in 1826 and the author of the catalogue, Alexis-Nicolas Pérignon, was in no doubt about their importance. However, if both David and his paintings were celebrated – or reviled, depending on the political orientation of the viewer – then his drawings, the foundation of everything he produced, were almost unknown. He was the man who had brought neoclassical painting to rapid perfection his pictures were public works that had both predicted and shaped the French Revolution he himself had been an active participant during the Revolution’s bloodiest years before pledging his allegiance and his brush to Napoleon and he was the teacher whose students and adherents would help define the art of the early 19th century. Preview and subscribe here.Īt his death in 1825, Jacques-Louis David was the most famous artist in Europe.

Jacques-Louis David by Maria Tsaneva