The Louvre’s Jacques-Louis David Retrospective Offers a Fresh Perspective on the French Master

The bicentenary of Jacques-Louis David, who passed away on December 28, 1825, is just around the corner. To mark the occasion, the Louvre presents an exhibition of 100 works by the celebrated French artist.

“This anniversary was certainly an opportunity,” the exhibition’s curator Sébastien Allard told ARTnews ahead of the opening, “but more importantly our last David retrospective dates back to 1989 and was strongly tied to the bicentennial of the French Revolution. After 35 years, it is time for us to revisit his career in a new light.”

Though the Paris museum may hold the largest collection of works by David, the exhibition, which opens October 15 and runs through January, is also being rounded out by prestigious loans, including the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium’s Mars Disarmed by Venus (1824), the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s The Death of Socrates (1787), Cleveland Museum of Art’s Cupid and Psyche (1817), the latter of which was not part of the 1989 exhibition.

“No comprehensive monograph on David had been published in French,” Allard said, noting that the Louvre’s accompanying exhibition catalog now changes that. “He had mainly been studied in relation to time periods which historiography tends to separate—the Ancien Régime, the French Revolution, the Empire. … I myself was initially most familiar with his later period.”

Even still, the impetus behind this David exhibition was not to assemble as many of the French master’s works as possible, as is often the case with blockbusters of this kind, but instead to highlight aspects of the artist’s practice that have not been examined in-depth before.

Key to this is David’s political engagement. During the final years of the Ancien Régime, he painted The Death of Socrates, which appealed to liberal circles in favor of a constitutional monarchy, like the work’s patron, Charles Louis Trudaine de Montigny, a member of the Paris parliament and son of the minister of finance. David then drew closer to Robespierre, before voting, as a member of the National Convention, in favor of the execution of Louis XVI. During the Reign of Terror (1793–94), David held several prominent positions—from member of the Committee of Public Instruction to president of the National Convention—while painting the portraits of revolutionary martyrs, including his friend Jean-Paul Marat, who was assassinated in 1793 as he soaked in a bath due to a worsening skin condition. After the Revolution, David narrowly escaped the guillotine, and from 1799 onward, fascinated by Napoleon Bonaparte, he became the First Painter to the Emperor. But with the Bourbon Restoration in 1815, David was forced into exile in Brussels, where he died in 1825.

“The enemies of the Revolution, who regarded [David] as the father of the French School, were concerned about saving the painter,” Allard said of the artist’s reputation which divided his contemporaries beginning in 1793. “Meanwhile, advocates of a social art, who deemed the classical form outdated, were committed to saving [David] the politician.” The exhibition aims to make the case that David’s complex politics during his time are inseparable from the work he produced during his more than four-decade career. To David, painting was not an end, but a means of moral and political transformation. His motto, according to Allard, was simple: to paint is to act.

The show also challenges the Neoclassical label long attached to David, which historically carries a cold, abstract sense of formalism. While he worked in a classical style and chose academic themes, he did so to speak to the concerns of his time, especially regarding the transition of a people from royal subjects into free citizens. For Allard, the term “Neoclassical” is at odds with David’s ambitious project of espousing ideals of freedom and fighting against academicism.

“We have deliberately avoided using the term altogether, as it carries a formalist connotation,” said Allard. “David’s references to the Roman Republic were a way for him to speak to the people in times of uncertainty. He looked to the past only to give society a future. … His classical choices were his way of imposing order on the chaos and violence of a society in the throes of reinvention.” Put another way, David may have drawn inspiration from French Baroque painter Nicolas Poussin, who was active more than a century earlier, but he did not paint in Poussin’s strictly classical style.

Caravaggio, in fact, seems to have exerted a far greater influence on David’s work, according to Allard, who said he wanted to demonstrate that connection explicitly. David first encountered Caravaggio’s paintings in 1779, when his teacher Joseph-Marie Vien sent him to Naples in hopes of lifting the young artist from a period of depression. (He had told Vien, the pioneer of Neoclassicism in painting: “Antiquity will not seduce me; it lacks spirit, it doesn’t stir the soul.”)

The experience proved revelatory: David realized his previous approach was mistaken and resolved to start anew, abandoning “this style whose principle was false,” as he once put it. When the Académie required him to produce a copy after a great master, he deliberately picked Valentin de Boulogne—one of Caravaggio’s followers—a rather unconventional choice at the time. David’s first large commission, Saint Roch Interceding with the Virgin for the Plague-Stricken (1780), demonstrates a dramatic chiaroscuro. Later works, such as The Death of Marat (1793) and Cupid and Psyche (1817), draw on Caravaggio’s Entombment of Christ (1603-04) and Cupid as Victor (1601-02), respectively. It was recently discovered that the latter work had been exhibited in Paris shortly before David created his own depiction of the god of love.

David’s influences aren’t the only misunderstanding of David that Allard hopes to correct with this exhibition. Take his nearly 14-foot-long Oath of the Horatii (1784). Based on an ancient Roman legend about warring cities, three sons raise their hands in a pledge of loyalty at their father who holds up their swords. Here, the men act while the women weep. This previously led many experts to characterize David as a misogynist. Allard, however, pointed out that this interpretation ignores that “in the 18th century, crying was not perceived as a weakness.” He countered this claim with David’s depiction of women in The Intervention of the Sabine Women (1799), in which “women have come a long way. They stand firm beside the men they have talked into reconciling,” the curator said.  

Another indication of David’s respect for women was his decision to open his studio to Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun’s students—a move that infuriated both the Academy and the Superintendent of the King’s Buildings, who oversaw the royal art academies during the Ancien Régime. Later, during his exile in Brussels, David was surrounded by female artists, including Sophie Rude. Allard also mentioned the painter’s wife Charlotte Pécoul, who divorced David for voting against King Louis XVI in 1793 though they remarried in 1796. “No one has studied her in depth, yet she seems like a passionate woman, with a keen sense of business—something like David’s impresario,” he said.

Because of their monumentality, three of the Louvre’s paintings could not relocate from the Salle Daru for the exhibition, including The Coronation of Napoleon (1805–07), Leonidas at Thermopylae (1814), and The Lictors Bring to Brutus the Bodies of His Sons (1789). During the run of the exhibition, the Salle Daru will also have an unusual feature, as a mirror will be installed across from The Coronation of Napoleon (on the wall where Oath of the Horatii and his 1783 painting Andromache Mourning Hector typically hang) to re-create an installation that David used in his studio beginning in 1808 first with The Intervention of the Sabine Women and later with Mars Disarmed by Venus, to heighten their visual impact on the public. “In that sense,” said Allard, “David was the inventor of immersive exhibitions.”

For the Louvre’s team, the exhibition’s installation is equally important to the experience of this retrospective that looks to redefine the French master. A visitor who has just gazed at Oath of the Horatii will soon catch a glimpse of The Tennis Court Oath, and later, when looking at The Death of Marat, will see Oath of the Horatii once again. “The display was designed so that the eye bounces naturally from one canvas to the next,” Allard said.

Highlights aside, Allard said, for him, the exhibition’s most important work is Mars Disarmed by Venus, which is believed to be the artist’s final work. “I told Laurence des Cars,” Allard said, referring to the Louvre’s president-director, “that if we could not have Mars Disarmed by Venus, there was no going through with the exhibition.” Allard sees the canvas, depicting the goddess of love and the god of war in an intimate scene, as a response to Jupiter and Thetis (1811) by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, a former student of David’s. By 1824, the Revolution was old news, Napoleon gone, and the Bourbon family back on the throne. Classical form had lost its value. Politically, David, still in exile, was back to square one, which could explain his return to mythological scenes. In France, a new leading painter had risen.

Perhaps, then, one could read Mars Disarmed by Venus as David defeated by Ingres, Allard posited, adding, “David’s true successors, those who seek the best way to remain connected to their time, are, when you think about it, the Romantics.”