Original subtitles

David was a revolutionary artist in every sense. His works spoke the classical language

of ancient Greece and Rome, or steer, self-controlled, heroic, but he broke your

opinion painting away from the sentimental fantasy of the Rococo and gave it a harder

edge. He was also a fully committed supporter of the French Revolution and Napoleon, using

his art as a powerful instrument of political propaganda.

Jacques Louis D'Avid was born on the 30th August 1748 in a house, just along the

cade on a mega-serie here in Paris. His father was an iron merchant who managed to

buy himself a position in local government. But when D'Avid was just nine years old, his father

was killed in a pistol duel, leaving the family to be brought up by their mother and supported

by two uncles. In 1765, age 17, D'Avid became a pupil of Joseph Marie-Vine, a professor

at the Royal Academy, who held lessons at his studio on the rudiment march. Whilst there,

D'Avid received an injury to his cheek during a fencing match, which developed into a

tumour that scarred him for life and made his speech difficult to understand. It seems

likely that this made him even more determined to express himself visually.

A year later, D'Avid enrolled at the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture housed here

in the former Palace of the Louvre. The Louvre was used not just for the Academy, but

also provided studio space and lodgings for students, as well as established artists,

and the whole creative ethos of the place was towards large-scale history painting that

D'Avid was determined to master. And this is one of his earliest efforts. It's called

the combat of Mars and Minerva, and it was produced in 1771, when D'Avid had been at

the Academy for a few years, and thought he was ready to enter the prestigious pre-derome

competition, which enabled the winners to spend between three and five years in the eternal

city. In effect, it's a rather poor imitation of the academic style of the time, what's

called Rococo and it's clear that D'Avid was struggling to make his own mark. The pre-derome

was an essential step on the road to becoming a successful artist, and so D'Avid entered

the competition three years running, but on each occasion he failed to win. One year he

was so bitterly disappointed that he even threatened to kill himself, but finally, in 1774,

he won the prize and headed south.

Do you impart to his youthful arrogance D'Avid didn't expect his work to be much affected

by his time in Rome, but there's no doubt that by the end of his stay, his art was completely

transformed. In many ways, it was the art of 17th-century Rome that had a decisive influence

on his work, particularly the paintings of Caravaggio. From him, D'Avid learnt how to employ

light and dark to augment both the realism of his figures and the inherent drama of the painted

narrative. Back in Paris, the influence of his time in Rome can clearly be seen in this work,

and drama-key morning hector, a picture that gained him acceptance as a full member of the

academy. Produced in 1783, the painting depicts a scene from home as Iliad, where its bleak,

naturalism and acutely observed details marked a significant departure, not only from D'Avid's

style, but from the predominant style of the academy too. It drew some criticism, but generally

the painting was admired, and D'Avid could now guarantee inclusion of his work at the salon,

which happened every two years, and was the only public exhibition of art in 18th-century France.

More importantly, though, D'Avid now numbered among the select few who receive the most prestigious

commissions from the King Louis XVI. In 1784, D'Avid began work on a royal commission,

did he receive two years earlier, in which he decided to wrestle with the tragic and dramatic

subject of the war between Albert and Rome in the 7th century before Christ. The paintings

called the Oath of the Horacei. At the centre of the picture, we see Horace, the Roman King,

handing over three swords to his three sons who were about to do battle. They're making their

vows of devotion to their country and their father. On the right-hand side, is where the dilemma

creeps in. Nearest to the viewer in white is Camilla, the woman who's been troathed to one of the

warriors from Albert, who are three brothers, are about to fight. The next to her is Sabine, who is from

the Albert side of the dispute, but she is married to one of the three brothers. So you have this

extraordinary and powerful moral dilemma. It's an incredibly controlled and dispassionate painting

in the way that it's actually produced, the way that oil is put on canvas by D'Avid. And in this

respect, he's breaking away from the orthodoxy of the Academy at the time, who want their

artists to show off a bit of Braviore brushwork here, some white impasto there. So there's a new

style of painting emerging here, what we now call neoclassicism. And that doesn't mean that D'Avid

is trying to paint like the ancients, but it means that he's trying to restore some of the

values of the classical world to his art. When D'Avid showed it at the salon, he told friends

that this work wasn't for the king, this was for himself, and that in effect he was producing

a manifesto for the way his art should go. And consequently he was hailed as the head of a new

school of French painting, and that domination would last for the next 30 years.

David's membership of the Academy also meant that he acquired a studio and lodging at the

Louvre. Here he established an extremely influential teaching practice, which produced some of

the most talented young painters of the day, artists like Gross and Ang. He also had married

recently Charlotte Pecul, the daughter of a wealthy building contractor. Her large dairy meant

the David who'd never been particularly rich was not wholly dependent on commissions for his income.

But in contrast with David's personal and professional life, France itself was in crisis.

Whilst the king and the aristocracy lived in unimaginable luxury, the majority of the population

suffered in abject poverty. Reform has clamored for change and demanded a constitutional monarchy.

But when in the summer of 1789, the king rejected this, the people of Paris took matters into their

hands, and storm the Bastille prison, seizing weapons from the armory, and in effect,

beginning the French Revolution. David's response in his painting to the Revolution,

at least initially, was guarded after all, he depended on the king and aristocracy,

for patronage, nonetheless, in the salon of 1789, with the Revolution beginning to rage around him,

he showed this painting that when we look at it, we'll realise it was quite a provocative one.

It's called the Lichters or Roman soldiers, returning to Brutus the bodies of his sons, and it shows

not Marcus Brutus, the man responsible for the assassination of Caesar, but Lucius Brutus,

the man who deposed the last king of Rome, Tarkwin, and established in 508 BC the Roman Republic.

What we see here, though, is the same compositional format and size as the oath of the Aracei,

but it's even more radical, because at the centre of the picture is a grey background.

With Brutus' wife gesturing to the bodies of her sons that have been carted in on the left

hand side, seemingly across the picture plane, and then going straight back into the surface of

the canvas, giving the work depth and movement. And then here in the foreground on the left hand side,

is the main subject, is Brutus, crowded in shadow, contemplating what he's done, a man who's made

ultimate sacrifice of his sons for his state. It's very easy with hindsight to see this work

as a statement of revolutionary intent by David, but we need to remind ourselves that, in fact,

he didn't know that the king was going to be deposed and eventually killed and in fact,

what was required by the revolution at this time was a constitutional monarchy. However,

in that volatile political climate of 1789, David must have known what he was doing in showing this work,

and the king's agents tried to have the work taken down of the salon walls,

but such was its critical and perhaps more crucially its popular success that the work remained

almost declared a triumph. As the revolution progressed, David became increasingly politicized,

recent events made him aware that he was living through a period of momentous change.

In 1791, he began work on a monumental painting, commemorating the founding moment of the revolution,

the oath sworn by members of the self-proclaimed National Assembly in the tennis court of

Versailles. Seeing here in a highly finished ink drawing, the oath of the tennis court was David's

first attempt at depicting a contemporary event. Part documentary record, part propaganda,

he approached the subject, just as he would have done a story from the ancient world. But only a

year after beginning the work, many of the principal protagonists have been discredited and

later executed, so to continue would have been dangerous, and therefore David's grand

revolutionary painting was never finished. In September 1792, David's involvement with politics

reached new heights when he was elected a deputy of the convention, the newly established

Revolutionary Government, and he allied himself with the most radical faction within the convention,

the mountain group in a particular to its leader, the former lawyer, Maximilian Robespierre,

who became one of the most powerful politicians of Revolutionary France. A year later,

and the convention voted narrowly for the execution of the king,

by guilty, with David, one of the most specific supporters of the idea.

But his wife was horrified, and in fact, she filed for divorce, but on the 16th of January,

1793, Louis XVI was indeed executed on what was called the Plastular Revolution,

now the Plastular Concord. But ironically, it wasn't the brutal execution of the king

that inspired David's greatest and most celebrated painting, and that came from the savage murder

of a revolutionary. David's increasing involvement with radical Parisian politics,

led to him producing, probably, the greatest image of the French Revolution. This one,

sometimes called the death of Mara, but called by David, Mara breathing his last, which is

significant, because it shows a man who's just about to die. That tells a brilliant story.

The story of Mara, the doctor who became a radical journalist, who edited a magazine called

friend of the people, but who also proclaimed that in order for the Revolution to succeed, it must

become more violent, and in turn, this triggered a young woman from Normandy, from the town of

called Charlotte Corday, to come to Paris on the eve of the Revolution's anniversary on the

13th of July, 1793, in order to assassinate Mara, and she gets access into his apartment,

by sending him a note saying this counter-revolutionary activity going on in Normandy.

And when she gets in, he's in the bath, because he has this chronic skin complaint.

And she pulls a butcher's knife out from under her dress, plunges it into Mara's heart, drops

the knife, and then waits to be arrested, and then executed. And what David proclaims in this painting,

is that Mara is the first great martyr of the French Revolution, and all the details point to that.

The sheets, on which she lies, and on which his blood seeps, are patched to show his modesty.

He clutches a blood splattered note written by Corday, proclaiming her own wretchedness,

and playing on his good nature, because she needs his kindness. The quail that he holds,

slump down by the side of the bath, he's just used to write a note, authorising money

to a woman, and a five children, whose father has just been killed fighting the Revolutionary

cause. And then this packing case, his modest desk, becomes a tombstone, and a homage,

Amara, to Mara, from David, with the date, the old Roman date, 1793 rubbed out, and replaced with

Londa, the second year of the Revolution. But there's a bigger picture to grasp here.

First of all, look at the background. No extraneous detail. This dark, murky void that pushes

the figure out, makes it stand out, and makes it almost supernatural in the way that it's illuminated.

And the pose, with life seeming to empty out of it, slumped over the bath, is also reminiscent

of numerous paintings, of Christ being taken down from the cross, or the Pieta, where he's held

by his mother, or perhaps best of all, the entomement. And it's as if the bath itself becomes his tomb.

What you also need to remember is when David saw the body, it was purifying, it was decomposing,

it was also covered in rashes and saws from Mara's chronic skin complaint. But here,

all that seems to have been transformed, and the body seems in a way to be made out of marble.

So what David is doing here, in a very acute clever, political and propagandist gesture,

is to produce an image partly of a classical god, partly of a religious martyr, in what is in effect

a republican alter piece. With the execution of the king, France was plunged into a period

of violent repression known as the reign of terror, in which almost 40,000 people died.

During this time, David served the term as president of the convention, and so will forever be

implicated in this dark period of French history. But by July 1794, the tide had turned,

ropes bare in his supporters were overthrown and agility in just days later.

David himself was imprisoned and came very close to being executed. Whilst in prison, David painted

this open and sympathetic self-portrait, which seems to invite the viewer to judge him not as a politician,

but as a painter. During this crisis in his life, David's wife Charlotte returned to support

her embattled husband, and the two were remarried two years later. At a time of great insecurity

for David, Portraitia provided his uncontroversial means of continuing his work. In 1795,

he painted this skillfully executed image of the Dutch ambassador, Jakobas Blau,

proving that his ordeal had not decreased his immense talent for painting.

And it was through a portrait commission that David was to meet a man who had changed not just

his life, but also who had altered the course of European history. Napoleon Bonaparte was a young

horse of consortia, who worked his way up to become general in the Revolutionary Army,

and had just returned to Paris after a very successful campaign in Italy. And such was his status,

his hero, that he was able to seek out the most famous French portrait painter of the day,

and ask him to paint his likeness, and this is the result. Now, it's unfinished, and one of

the reasons was, as David later commented, that Napoleon was so restless and full of energy, he only

sat for three hours. It's a fascinating painting this one, because it reveals very simply

something of the process of making a painting, from the simple lines that create the pose

to the build-up of layers of paint. And that magical idea of transformation of inert pigment on

canvas into something approaching the likeness of a living, breathing, human being. It also has

this slightly magical aura, because it shows Napoleon as a young man, and hints at the idea of

becoming something else, something grander. And in fact, within two years of David doing this portrait,

he'd staged a coup d'état with the help of the Army, and proclaimed himself first

console of France, and within a few more years, with various military victories behind him,

he'd become, in effect, a military dictator, and with that, the democratic idea of the revolution

went out the window. In 1801, David produced this heroic image of Napoleon crossing the

Alps at the head of his army. On the rocks below, David inscribed Napoleon's name,

along with those of the great conquerors of the Alps, Hannibal and Charlemagne. And so in many ways,

the image is an exercise in political propaganda, with Napoleon cast as an idealised hero,

master of not only his army, but of nature itself. Napoleon refused to sit for David,

which is perhaps why the portrait looks unlike any other of him.

Subsequently, though, the painting was extremely well received, and Napoleon ordered several copies.

David quickly establishes himself as the chronicle of Napoleon and Napoleon's reign,

but his greatest work, or at least his biggest, coincides with Napoleon's greatest personal triumph.

His crowning, as Emperor, in December 1804, and it's that image when Napoleon is actually crowning

his Empress Josephine, that forms the bases of this work that David wanted to be, almost the

biggest painting that existed in France, and so it's a painting that proclaims the monstrous ego

of David, and the even more monstrous ego of Napoleon. Not surprisingly, this vast undertaking

took David the best part of two years, bolster by the fact that Napoleon had made him first painted

to the Emperor, and he sets himself up in a de-consecreted church, his studio, and gets set builders

from the Paris Opera, to reconstruct parts of Notre Dame Cathedral, in which the ceremony itself

was taken place, and there's over 70 recognisable portraits. From Napoleon's brothers,

here on the left of the picture, through to the Empress, who incidentally was 41 years old when

this was painted, so David's done a very good rejuvenation job on her, two Napoleon's stepsson,

who here holds a sword, rather like heartily, but the two choir boys can have a look at.

But in the end, the whole painting is staged and lit, so that there is no doubt that Napoleon is here

and when you look at the work, there's something sensuous about the colours and about the way

that David's applied paint. And in a way, we can see here that he's moving away from neoclassicism

from that manifesto proclaims style with the oath of the ratio to a style that you might call

Napoleonic, or Empire, where things become looser and more celebratory. And then, in the scale of

the work, the viewer is invited almost to step into the picture and get a privileged access

to an event that only the great and the good in Paris, and by extension in France,

would have had access to. But perhaps most crucially for David, what matters is what Napoleon thinks,

and actually he's bold over by the work. He says, this is not a painting, you can actually walk around

in the picture, and then he adds that life is everywhere. So, and after the completion of the

coronation, commissions from Napoleon dried up, partly due to the massive fees that David requested,

however he did paint one last portrait. The commission came from a Scottish aristocrat

who paid the enormous sum of a thousand Guinness to have this portrait of the French emperor.

David depicts him in a very sympathetic light, emphasising his dedication and achievements,

despite the fact that Napoleon was in effect, a tyrant who plunged the whole of Europe into a

long series of brutal wars. As Napoleon's grand-armée battled across Europe, David was

working on this painting, the anidas at Thermopylae, which he'd begun originally in 1798.

The work shows the king of Spartra and his army as they faced certain death at the hands of the

Persians. The polion commented that David shouldn't waste his time painting the defeated,

a remark that, through rather poignant, in view of what was just about to happen.

After the disastrous attempted invasion of Russia, the sun seemed to be setting

for Napoleon's grand-armée when it was defeated at the Battle of Leipzig, and by March 1814,

the Allied armies were here in Paris and Napoleon was forced to abdicate, and the more Russian

soldiers camping along the Shons' elis and two of them were even billeted under the same roof

as David, and proclaimed themselves to be delighted to be sharing the house of Europe's most famous

painter. And the Allies re-established the Bourbon Monarchy under Louis XIII, and David,

loyal as evident of Napoleon, withdrew from public life.

Well, Napoleon was exiled to the Mediterranean island of Elber. He returned to France at the

beginning of 1815 for one final campaign, but was defeated at the Battle of Waterloo.

Subsequently, all anti-monarchists, as well as Napoleon's supporters, were forced into exile

from France by King Louis XIII. But David, because he was so immensely famous, was permitted to stay.

However, such was his own disdaste at the Monarchy. He decided to come into exile, and moved

here to Brussels a year later, in 1816, and the Louis was getting on at the time, he was 67.

He said a rather profitable business, painting the portraits of French exiles, as well as the

Belgian aristocracy. While he was in Brussels, David also painted mythological scenes.

Notably, this work, which is familiar in a way in its new classicism, but also slightly

crackers. It shows the god of war, Mars, being seduced and disarmed by the goddess of Love Venus.

With our hand laden's, the three graces in the background,

frolicing about, not looking particularly graceful. And on one level, I think David, as an old man,

is trying to experiment. He knows that the end is perhaps not too far away, suffering from chronic

heart disease at the time. He's also knocked down by a horse and cart on his way back from the

theater, while he's in the process of painting this work, but he still manages to finish it.

And he describes this work as he's endure to painting.

In his last years, David was begged to return to France, but he never did,

an opponent of the Bourbons till the end. In 1825, after nine years of exile in Brussels,

the 77-year-old David died in the arms of his son, New Jane.

Although refused burial in France, David received a lavish funeral in Brussels. At the post-mortem,

the family were given his heart in a silver urn, and at the death of his mother, in 1826,

Eugene buried his father's heart, alongside her in the cemetery of pearlishers in Paris.

David's influence on European painting was immense, while he was later blamed for the decline of

a court with the conservative Ancior regime, with the zealots of the French Revolution,

and with Napoleon. He gave contemporary life in its struggle,

something of the grandeur of ancient Roman Greece, and produced painting which read as a monument

to the control, boldness, intellect, and ambitions of its creator.