^ Died on 29 December 1825: Jacques~Louis David, French painter born on 30 August 1748.
— Born to a family of masons and building contractors David studied under Joseph-Marie Vien, to whom he had been recommended by François Boucher, a relative by marriage. After receiving the Prix de Rome in 1774 on his fourth attempt, he spent five years at the French Academy in Italy. Immersion in the art of the ancients and the old masters had a reformative impact on his style, and he abandoned the colorism of his early rococo manner for a more monumental and somber approach. With The Grief of Andromache of 1783, he was elected to the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture, and his Serment des Horaces of 1784 became a manifesto for the new classicism.
      David played a major role in the French Revolution, serving on the Committee for Public Instruction, organizing political pageants, and working on such revolutionary images as The Death of Marat . After the fall of Robespierre, he was arrested and imprisoned for a short time. David rose to power again, however, through his support of Napoleon, for whom he painted numerous portraits and grand commemorative pictures such as Le Sacre de Napoléon et Joséphine (1806). With the Bourbon Restoration, David was forced into exile in Brussels, where he maintained a studio and attempted in his late portraits and mythologies a reconciliation.
— Jacques-Louis David, French painter. He was a supporter of the French Revolution and one of the leading figures of Neoclassicism. He was a distant relative of Boucher, who perhaps helped his early artistic progress as a pupil under Vien (1765). He won the Prix de Rome in 1774 and traveled with his master to Rome where he spent six years. It was during this period (1775-81), that he abandoned the grand manner of his early work, with its Baroque use of lighting and composition for a stark, highly finished and morally didactic style. This was influenced by the ideas then current in Rome and by artists such as Hamilton who were already experimenting with a Neoclassical idiom. In 1784 the change of style was confirmed by the Oath of the Horatii, probably the most famous and certainly the most severe of a series of works which extolled the antique virtues of stoicism, masculinity and patriotism. During the French Revolution, David played an active role both artistically he reorganized the Académie and produced numerous and spectacular propaganda exercises - and politically, as an avid supporter of Robespierre, who voted for the execution of the king. He also attempted to catalogue the new heroes of the age, abortively in the Oath of the Tennis Court, and successfully in his pieta-like portrayal of the Death of Marat (1793). He eventually lost out in the confused politics of the 1790s, was imprisoned under the moderate Directory and saved by the intervention of his estranged wife, symbolized in his Intervention of the Sabine Women (1799), a work which strained his Classicism in the search for Greek purity. In 1799 Napoléon gained power, and David gained a new hero. He recorded the general and later the Emperor in numerous propaganda pieces (e.g. Napoléon at Mont St Bernard, 1800; The Crowning of Joséphine) in which his sobriety was loosened by Napoléon's demand for grandeur. In professional terms, he failed to survive the fall of his master, and in 1815 retired in exile to Brussels, where he continued to work in a highly finished Classical vein, but resorted to myth for his subject-matter (e.g. The Disarming of Mars). Throughout his career he produced portraiture which not only catalogued the changing political spectrum, but also his own artistic developments (e.g. Antoine Lavoisier and his Wife, 1788). He was also a great teacher, numbering among his pupils Gros, Ingres, Gérard and Girodet, although few of them actually followed the severity of his style."
— Jacques-Louis David was born into a prosperous middle-class family in Paris. In 1757 his mother left him to be raised by his uncles after his father was killed. He was never a good student in school- in his own words, "I was always hiding behind the instructors chair, drawing for the duration of the class".
      When David was 16 he began studying art at the Académie Royale under the rococo painter J. M. Vien. After many unsuccessful attempts, he finally won the Prix de Rome in 1774, and on the ensuing trip to Italy he was strongly influenced by classical art and by the classically inspired work of the 17th-century painter Nicolas Poussin. David quickly evolved his own individual neoclassical style, drawing subject matter from ancient sources and basing form and gesture on Roman sculpture. His famous Oath of the Horatii was consciously intended as a proclamation of the new neoclassical style in which dramatic lighting, ideal forms, and gestural clarity are emphasized. Presenting a lofty moralistic (and by implication patriotic) theme, the work became the principal model for noble and heroic historical painting of the next two decades. It also launched his popularity and awarded him the right to take on his own students.
      After 1789, David adopted a realistic rather than neoclassical painting style in order to record scenes of the French Revolution (1789-1799). David was very active in the Revolution, being elected a deputy to the National Convention on 17 September 1792. He took his place with the extremists known as the Montagnards — along with Marat, Danton, and Robespierre.
      During this time he had produced deeds both positive and negative: On the positive side he proposed the establishment of an inventory of all national treasures- making him one of the founders of France's museums. In fact, he played an active role in the organization of the future Louvre, Paris.
      On the negative side, his radicalism during the Revolution bred within him a certain madness. He was appointed to the Comité de Salut Public in 1793 — which gave him the power to sign nearly 300 arrested individuals to be guillotined. After the end of the Revolution, imprisoned because of his actions during the Reign of Terror, he wrote a letter to a friend stating, "I believed, in accepting the post of legislator — an honorable post, but one very difficult to fulfill — that an upright heart would suffice, but I was lacking in the second quality, by which I mean insight." A delegation of his students demanded his release, and he was freed on 28 December 1794.
      Near the end of 1797 David met Napoléon Bonaparte. From 1799 to 1815 he was Napoléon's official painter, chronicling the reign of Napoléon I in huge works such as The Coronation of Napoléon and Joséphine. Following Napoléon's downfall in 1815, David was exiled to Brussels, where he returned to mythological subjects drawn from the Greek and Roman past. He stayed there until his death.
      David, throughout his career, was also a prolific portraitist. Smaller in scale and more intimately human than his larger works, his portraits, such as the famous Madame Récamier, show great technical mastery and understanding of character. Many modern critics consider them his best work, especially because they are free from the moralizing messages and sometimes stilted technique of his neoclassical works.
— LINKS
— Laure-Emilie-Felicité David, La Baronne Meunier (1812)
— La Bonne Aventure (1824) — Napoléon in His Study