Jacques-Louis David at the Louvre

The Louvre is currently hosting a major retrospective of Jacques-Louis David to mark the bicentenary of his death, bringing together approximately one hundred paintings and drawings. The exhibition includes significant loans from Brussels, where David lived in exile after the Restoration.

In France, Jacques-Louis David (1748–1825) is considered a national treasure, having painted two of the nation's most iconic works: “Death of Marat” (1793) and “Napoleon Crossing the Alps” (1801). These are also the only two paintings by David that I know, although I must have seen more of his work on previous visits to the Louvre.

The exhibition frames David as a "committed artist" whose political convictions shaped both his life and work—and that's an understatement. David was an active supporter of the French Revolution and a friend of Robespierre. In 1793, as a deputy for Paris, he voted for the execution of Louis XVI. Following Robespierre's fall from power, he was briefly imprisoned, narrowly escaping the guillotine. Upon his release, he aligned himself with Napoleon Bonaparte, becoming the regime's official court painter after the proclamation of the Empire in 1804. After Napoleon's fall from power and the Bourbon Restoration, David went into exile in Brussels despite being granted amnesty by Louis XVIII. He would continue to work and paint there until his death in 1825.

David struggled for years to establish his artistic identity. He is even said to have considered suicide after four successive failures to win the Royal Academy's Prix de Rome. In 1774, having finally won the Prix de Rome, he moved to Rome for a residency at the French Academy. In 1779, he suffered an artistic crisis, which eventually led him to move beyond the neoclassicism of Poussin and the realism and chiaroscuro of Caravaggio. In 1783, at the age of 35, he became an official member of the Royal Academy. Two years later, he exhibited his first masterpiece, “The Oath of the Horatii” (1785). During this period, David painted mainly large canvases depicting scenes from antiquity, such as “The Death of Socrates” (1787) and “The Loves of Paris and Helen” (1788), of which he created two nearly identical versions for different clients. A painting like “The Lictors Bringing Brutus the Body of His Sons” (1789) takes on a different meaning once you consider the revolutionary temper spreading through Paris and France at the time.

The organizers of the exhibition have brought together all three versions of “The Death of Marat” (1793). I'm ashamed to admit that I didn't know the version in the Louvre, featuring the famous line "N'ayant pu me corrompre ils m'ont assassiné" (Unable to corrupt me, they murdered me), is in fact a replica created by the artist's studio. It is an astonishing painting that transforms a murdered journalist into a Christ-like martyr, complete with a wound echoing the Passion and a drooping arm borrowed from Michelangelo's Pietà.

What makes David particularly fascinating is the tension between his severe history paintings and his remarkably modern portraits. The backgrounds of works like Madame Récamier and Marie Louise Josèphe Trudaine (1791–92) abandon polished surfaces for something more experimental: confetti-like marks and swirling rose petals applied with the tip of the brush. Whether unfinished or deliberately innovative, these canvases reveal David as a subtle colorist rather than the cold technician he sometimes appears to be.

As always, I particularly enjoyed seeing the preparatory sketches David made for his paintings. He used a grid system to get the proportions right and to transfer figures to larger canvases.

The exhibition portrays Jacques-Louis David as an artist whose work anticipated history as often as it responded to it. His first painting to be shown to critical acclaim at the Paris Salon “Belisarius Begging for Alms” (1782) was interpreted as a critique of royal tyranny before the Revolution had even begun, while “The Tennis Court Oath” (1792) was abandoned mid-painting, having been overtaken by historical events as its heroes were either disgraced or sent to the guillotine. The Louvre's retrospective captures this paradox: a classical painter giving shape to revolutionary chaos and a committed artist who was also a consummate survivor.

Jacques-Louis David is at the Louvre until 26 January 2026.