Jacques-Louis David

Jacques-Louis David was born in Paris on 30 August 1748 into a Parisian family of modest means; his father died when he was about nine, and relatives from a family of builders and architects helped raise him. He trained under Joseph-Marie Vien, a painter who had moved away from the Rococo towards antique models. After several failed attempts he won the Prix de Rome in 1774 with Erasistratus Discovering the Cause of Antiochus's Disease, and in October 1775 he travelled to Italy with Vien, newly appointed director of the French Academy in Rome. He came back to Paris in July 1780 and joined the Academy in 1783. A supporter of the Revolution, he was elected to the National Convention in 1792, was imprisoned after Robespierre's fall, then became Napoleon's court painter. After the Restoration he went into exile in Brussels, where he died on 29 December 1825 after being struck by a carriage.

David broke with the Rococo of Boucher and the Van Loos and drew on Poussin, Raphael and the antique, which he studied in Rome and during a visit to Naples in 1779. The Oath of the Horatii (1784-85, Louvre, Paris), begun in Paris and finished in Rome, made him the head of the new classical school; its figures are drawn with straight, hard lines against a plain, shallow architectural background. The Death of Socrates (1787, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) followed for a private patron. Under the Revolution he painted The Death of Marat (1793, Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels), a bare, quiet image of a murdered politician lit like a martyr. Under the Empire his colour grew warmer and his scale larger in The Coronation of Napoleon (1805-07, Louvre), a canvas of more than six metres by nine, painted from a commission of September 1804.

David's studio, which counted about forty pupils at its height, trained Antoine-Jean Gros, François Gérard, Anne-Louis Girodet, Jean-Germain Drouais and Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres. In exile in Brussels he taught François-Joseph Navez and Ignace Brice, painted portraits of local sitters and, in 1822-24, his last large canvas, Mars Disarmed by Venus and the Three Graces. His influence on French academic painting reached well into the nineteenth century, and the largest collection of his paintings and drawings is in the Louvre. For a painter working in oils, these canvases offer a lesson in restraint: sober tonal contrasts in the Revolutionary years, flesh and drapery modelled with clear edges, and, under Napoleon, the warmer Venetian reds and golds of the Empire.

Biographical details on Wikipedia.