Jacques-Louis David
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Who Was Jacques-Louis David?
Jacques-Louis David was a painter of great renown as his style of history painting helped end the frivolity of the Rococo period, moving art back to the realm of classical austerity. One of David's most famous works, "The Death of Marat" (), portrays the famous French Revolutionary figure dead in his bath after an assassination.
Early Life
David was born on August 30, , in Paris, France. His father was killed in a duel in when David was 9 years old, and the boy was subsequently left by his mother to be raised by two uncles.
When David showed an interest in painting, his uncles sent him to François Boucher, a leading painter of the time and family friend. Boucher was a Rococo painter, but the Rococo era was giving way to a more classical style, so Boucher decided to send David to his friend Joseph-Marie Vien, a painter more in tune with the neoclassical reaction to Rococo.
By age 18, the gifted young artist was enrolled at the Académie Royale (Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture). After several failures in competitions and finding more discouragement than support, during a period that included a suicide
Summary of Jacques-Louis David
The quintessential Neoclassical painter, David's monumental canvases were perhaps the final triumph of traditional history painting. Adopting the fashionable Greco-Roman style, David blended these antique subjects with Enlightenment philosophy to create moral exemplars. His linear forms dramatically illustrated narratives that often mirrored contemporary politics. As the premier painter of his day, David served the monarchy of Louis XVI, the post-revolutionary government, and the Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte, despite the radical differences in these ruling regimes. He also ran an important studio where his students would later rebel against his example, sowing the seeds of modernism.
Accomplishments
- David was the first French artist to unite classical subjects with a linear precision and minimalist composition. Completely rejecting the decorative and painterly effects of the Rococo, his canvases created powerful, didactic works of moral clarity with few distractions or pictorial flourishes. David's paintings answered the demand for art that directly conveyed civic virtues to a wide audience.
- Although paintings such as The Oath of the Horatii
Jacques Louis David Biography In Details
On the Bourbons returning to power, David figured in the list of proscribed former revolutionaries and Bonapartists - for having voted execution for the deposed King Louis XVI; and for participating in the death of Louis XVII. Mistreated and starved, the imprisoned Louis XVII was forced to confess to incest with his mother, Queen Marie-Antoinette, (untrue; separated early, son and mother were disallowed communication, nevertheless, the allegation helped earn her the guillotine). The new Bourbon King, Louis XVIII, however, granted amnesty to David and even offered him the position of court painter. David refused, preferring self-exile in Brussels. There, he trained and influenced Brussels artists like Francois-Joseph Navez and Ignace Brice, painted Cupid and Psyche and quietly lived the remainder of his life with his wife (to whom he had remarried). In that time, he painted smaller-scale mythological scenes, and portraits of citizens of Brussels and Napoleonic emigres, such as the Baron Gerard.
His last, great work, Mars Disarmed by Venus and the Three Graces, he began in and completed the year before his death. In December , he wro
David, Jacques-Louis (–)
The French painter Jacques Louis David () was the leader of the neoclassic movement. His style set the artistic standards for many of his contemporaries and determined the direction of numerous 19th-century painters.
Jacques Louis David early turned his back on the frivolous rococo manner, looking instead to antiquity for inspiration. Following the ideals of Nicolas Poussin, to whom the artist candidly admitted he owed everything, David sought to reduce classical principles to their barest, unencumbered essentials. In this endeavor he observed with avid interest the neoclassicism propounded by Johann Winckelmann and the illustrations of antiquity found in the paintings of Anton Raphael Mengs. An outspoken political firebrand, David espoused the cause of the French Revolution and under the Convention held sway as the virtual dictator of the arts; later when Napoleon came to power, he acted willingly as his artistic spokesman.
David was born in Paris on Aug. 30, His well-to-do bourgeois family placed him in the studio of that arch-practitioner of the rococo manner, the eminent painter François Boucher, to whom David was apparently distantly related
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