Jacques-Louis David was a French painter, born in Paris in 1748, who died in exile in Brussels in 1825. He led Neoclassicism for half a century, voted for the death of Louis XVI, painted the murdered Jean-Paul Marat as a martyr in 1793 and became First Painter to Napoleon. He is remembered above all for The Death of Marat, a bathtub murder turned into an altarpiece.
He sat in the assembly that sent a king to the guillotine, then painted the emperor who ended the Republic. The painting most people come looking for was ordered by that same assembly.
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The National Convention, the assembly that governed France, ordered the canvas the day after Marat died. David, a deputy who sat on its security committee, delivered it in under three months. Marat had been stabbed in his bath on 13 July 1793 by Charlotte Corday, who was guillotined four days later.
In Marat's dead hand is the letter that got Corday through the door. On the rough wooden crate beside the tub lies another, in which Marat orders money sent to a widow with five children. David put a lie and a kindness side by side, so that the victim could be read as a saint.
The painting was meant to settle how France would remember one man. David's own standing was far less settled. Within a year he was in prison, and years later the canvas followed him into exile, which is why it hangs in Brussels and not in Paris.
What You'll Discover
Why Rome made him wait.
What hung beside Marat.
What he hid in his self-portrait.
Who steps between the armies.
Who is really crowning whom.
Where his heart lies.