Biography of Jacques Louis David


Jacques Louis David is a French artist. In fact, David was a dictator for his generation. Leaving far beyond the boundaries of paintings, his influence guided the style of fashion, furniture and interior design, and also reflected on the development of moral philosophy. Art throughout the biography of David was an unexpected, decisive destruction of traditions. This is the origin of the modern trend.

David studied at the French Academy. After receiving a Roman scholarship Prix de Rome, in 1775 he went to Italy. His desire for ancient art, received in Rome, as well as a review of the ruins of Pompeii and Herculaneum, pushed the revival of the classical trend in French art. He borrowed classical forms and motifs, mainly from sculptures, in order to demonstrate the sense of dignity attributed to the ancient Romans.

Destroyed by a thirst for impeccability, as well as political ideas about the French revolution, David in his works imposed a strict restriction on the expression

of feelings. Such suppression eventually resulted in distinctive indifference and rationalism.

Reputation in the biography of David was mainly earned at the exhibition in 1784. Then he presented his greatest work “The Oath of the Horatii”. This canvas, as well as “Death of Socrates”, “Lictors Bringing to Brutus the Bodies of His Sons”, expressed the theme of the relevant political situation. The works brought David great popularity. In 1780 he was invited to the Royal Academy, he worked as an approximate artist of the king.

As a mighty Republican, David since the election to the Constitutional Convention, supported the departure of the King and the disintegration of the Royal Academy in France and Rome. In his paintings of the revolutionary sufferers, especially in the “Marat”, his iron control softened. Dramatic portraits, he gave a gloss. For a while, the artist was imprisoned until the end of the policy of terror.

David became the first artist of the emperor, fixing events from the life of Napoleon. Also the biography of Jacques Louis David was known

as a magnificent portraitist. During this period, David’s influence was greatest. But his paintings, more than ever embodying neoclassical theory, again became static and insensitive.

During the restoration of the monarchy, the restoration of the Bourbons, David spent his final years in Brussels. Then he wrote a series of magnificent portraits. Despite the fact that the artist underestimated the portrait genre, in it he was most famous. Using living figures more willingly than sculpting, he allowed his spontaneous feelings to unfold in the figure. The last paintings in David’s biography are extremely vital. They clearly showed the features of the birth of a new romanticism.


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Biography of Jacques Louis David