Jacques Louis David: Radical Draftsman

By all accounts, David appears to have been ambitious and headstrong from the time he began his training in the studio of Joseph Marie Vien in 1764. Studies after posed male nudes, called académies, were considered an essential exercise for aspiring history painters. Despite their facility of handling, the surviving drawings from David’s youth offer few hints of the artist he would become.

It must not have been long after his arrival in Rome that David tried his hand at a tradition venerated among French artists visiting Italy: drawing young Italian women in regional dress. He would have been aware of precedents by Nicolas Vleughels, Jean Barbault, and Jean-Baptiste Greuze, if not from the works themselves, then from the engravings made after them, which featured full-length figures, detailed costumes, and identifying captions.

In David’s Young Woman of Frascati, the subject is shown standing and in strict profile, with a long headscarf falling to a point behind her back and a tight-waisted, striped dress embellished with ribbons at the shoulder. However, unlike the earlier tradition which focusing on details of dress, here the subject is presented at half-length and bathed in natural light, her fresh features and upswept hair outshining the details of her costume.

After returning to Paris in 1780, David pasted the sketches from his student years in Rome into large albums according to type. Here, he grouped three studies of seated or reclining women, two based on antiquities and one (middle) on an unidentified source. Figures like these find an echo in his compositions of the 1780s, such as the two drawings depicting Camilla hanging nearby.

With a name suggestive of the setting in which they were made, académies, or studies of male nudes, were an essential component in the training of young artists in eighteenth-century France. Props were sometimes included as vague allusions to historical and mythological characters. In this case, the chain presages David’s lifelong interest in themes of imprisonment and liberty.

This recently discovered work demonstrates David’s mastery of anatomy in the académie (male nude) format, a type of drawing he would abandon after returning to Paris. He was clearly proud of this example, however; he presented it as a gift to Jean Augustin Renard, who won the Prix de Rome for architecture in 1773 and overlapped with David at the Académie de France in Italy from 1775 to 1777.

Toward the end of his time in Italy, David began to develop ideas for compositions that would announce his new style, one of sober subjects and monumental figures aligned with the picture plane. This drawing, presumably made in Naples, was inspired by a 1767 novel by Jean François Marmontel centered around the legend of the Byzantine general Belisarius, reduced in his old age to begging on the streets.










Two years later, David was accepted into the Académie Royale, the prestigious visual arts institution supported by the king, after submitting a painting based on the design. It would hang, along with a dozen or so other canvases, as part of the artist’s impressive debut at the Salon of 1781, an exhibition mounted in the building that today houses the Musée du Louvre.

In his last months in Italy, David drew a frieze depicting the death and funeral procession of an ancient warrior. The shallow composition evokes Roman low-relief sculpture. Originally more than seven feet long over eight sheets of paper, the drawing was cut in two toward the end of the eighteenth century.







The segment here presents a violent vignette of a classical warrior raising his sword to slay his fallen adversary. The human pair is flanked by immortal onlookers. On the left, Athena and Hercules watch the battle with steely expressions. On the right are the three Fates: Clotho, who spins the thread of life, appears agitated as Atropos prepares to sever it. Meanwhile, Lachesis watches indolently.

For his reception piece—the final step in gaining full membership at the Académie Royale—David chose a well-known subject from Greek mythology, Andromache and her son crying over the death of her husband. In classical literature, lamentation is presented as the female counterpart to male valor. Considered particularly tragic was the story of Andromache. Her husband, Hector, the prince of Troy, was slain in battle by Achilles, and her young son, Astyanax, would soon be thrown from the city’s ramparts to thwart any future acts of revenge or claims to the throne.







David worked out the composition through an extended series of studies, eventually paring it down to the essential triad of mother, son, and dead father. It contains an echo of the artist’s youth as an only child who lost his father at a young age.

In the early 1780s, eager to establish his reputation, David explored on paper many potential subjects, not all of which were committed to canvas. One such abandoned project was the story of Caracalla, a dark tale of a tyrannical ruler from the late Roman Republic. The emperor Septimius Severus, upon his death, had designated both of his sons, Geta and Caracalla, as successors. Caracalla, desiring to rule alone, murdered his brother in the arms of his mother, Julia Domna. For this act, he would later be berated by the ghost of his father.







David was often drawn to brutal subjects from antiquity but, in the end, would deem the violence unsuitable for painting, preferring instead scenes of prelude or aftermath.

For a royal commission, David made a series of studies based on the story of the ancient Roman general Marcus Atilius Regulus. He would eventually opt for a different subject of his own choosing, a latitude he apparently felt free to exercise.







Regulus is known for having been captured by the Carthaginians in the First Punic War and released to go to Rome and negotiate a peace. Afterward, he rejected the entreaties of his family to remain and chose instead to honor the terms of his parole and return to Carthage, where he was tortured and killed.







While the composition did not progress beyond paper, its theme of conflict between patriotic duty and familial attachments resonates with David’s other history subjects of this period.

As was his practice, David began his famous painting The Oath of the Horatii (Musée du Louvre, Paris), by researching the story—through texts, images, and theater—and considering carefully which moment he wanted to depict.







In the ancient war that pitted Romans against Albans, three brothers each from the clans of the Horatii and the Curiatii were designated to fight a proxy battle. When Horatius returned victorious, he was infuriated by his sister’s anguish at hearing of the death of her fiancé and raised his sword to slay her. Their father would later defend his act of murder.







This drawing and several others show that David experimented with this episode before changing course and choosing, as he often did, psychological depth over graphic violence.

From the time he received the royal commission in 1781 to the display of The Oath of the Horatii (Musée du Louvre, Paris) at the Salon of 1785, David made numerous studies, fine-tuning every detail of the painting that would cement his reputation as leader of the French school.







After considering different moments of the legend, he ended up devising a scene that does not figure in any of the literary sources that he might have consulted: the three Horatii brothers swearing an oath to their father before going to battle the Curiatii.







In this compositional study, we can see David’s early focus on the contrast between the rigid patriotism of the men and the swooning dread of the women.

David often made oil sketches to work out the palette and tonal contrast before setting brush to canvas. These studies usually began as drawings on paper—indeed, the underlying pen and ink sketch is still visible here—before areas of color were blocked in with oil paint.







In this sketch we see the composition near its final form, with only the poses of certain figures still to be tweaked. The palette of the finished picture, however, would be considerably cooler, with different hues chosen for many of the costumes.

In the fall of 1784, David returned to Rome to focus on completing his painting The Oath of the Horatii. There, as the last stage of preparation, he made, perhaps with the assistance of his student Jean Germain Drouais, large drapery studies for each of the major figures. Drawn from posed models, they combine black and white chalks to carefully record the fall of light on the folds of fabric.







The overlapping figures are rendered in contour alone and placed to block out the areas of clothing that would not be visible, an indication that the composition was already largely resolved. The grid of squares drawn over the study was a method of transferring the design to canvas.

The tracing is made from an illustration depicting an ancient vase in the collection of William Hamilton, the British ambassador to Naples in Pierre d’Hancarville, Antiquités étrusques, grecques et romaines tirées du cabinet de M. Hamilton, envoyé extraordinaire et plénipotentiaire de S. M. Britannique en cours de Naples (Naples: François Morelli, 1766–67), vol. 4, pl. 24. According to Rosenberg and Prat (2002, vol. 1, no. 730*, p. 538), the vase depicted in the print was not, in fact, from Hamilton’s collection.

The tracing was pasted into one of the large albums of drawings David created following his return from Italy in 1780. Perusing these albums, presumably a few years later, prompted the artist to make a quick sketch in black chalk (see 2022.____) directly on the album page opposite the tracing, focusing on the figures of Paris and Helen. The figural group would evolve through a series of studies, eventually taking the form of the protagonists in David’s painting, The Loves of Paris and Helen, 1788 (Musée du Louvre, Paris).

In addition to his own drawings, David’s Roman albums included tracings (probably done by a fellow student). In this case, a tracing based on a print shows the designs on an ancient vase in the collection of the British ambassador to Naples, William Hamilton. It in turn inspired David to make a quick sketch of the central two figures: the Trojan prince Paris with the Spartan queen Helen, whose love would set into motion the Trojan War.







Signaling a greater interest in the amorous than the martial elements of the story, David has swapped Paris’s spear for a zither (string instrument) and is exploring how the intertwined poses might at once convey longing and foreboding. The theme was eventually developed into a canvas for King Louis　XVI’s younger brother, Charles Philippe, comte d’Artois.

Painted for the king’s younger brother, the comte d’Artois, The Loves of Paris and Helen is dated 1788— the year before the storming of the Bastille (the royal fortress and prison in Paris), one of the events leading to the downfall of the French monarchy.







Reflecting the tastes of his patron, David placed the besotted young lovers in an elegant interior, a composition he had developed in a series of ink and wash drawings. This oil sketch anticipates the luminous effect of the finished canvas, although David would go on to change the colors of many individual areas.

In the early 1780s, David would often brainstorm ideas for paintings without a specific commission in mind. Here, he depicts Socrates, the ancient Greek philosopher convicted of "impiety" against the traditional religion by the Athenian courts. Rather than renounce his beliefs, Socrates prepares to drink the poison hemlock, but pauses to address his distressed disciples.







The drawing is a layered construction, worked with apparent urgency and revealing a sequence of ideas and revisions. Even after sketching the figures in black chalk and modeling them in gray wash, David reduced the size of the doorway in the angled wall and altered the pose and scale of the seated figure holding the book, in both cases by pasting irregularly shaped pieces of paper onto the sheet and redrawing those areas.

It was likely several years after his initial sketch of the subject (hanging nearby) that David made this study for The Met’s Death of Socrates painting. In a frenzy of reworking, he tried out various ideas for the architectural setting before deciding to pierce the stone backdrop with an arched hallway leading to a set of stairs, using a compass and straightedge to establish the perspective. The vanishing point is placed to draw attention to the bent head of Plato, who wrote—many years later—the account of Socrates’s death. But David’s clear obsession was with the center of the composition, where fanned-out options for the placement of limbs draw the viewer’s eye to the critical vignette: the passage of poison from one hand to another.

This highly finished drawing is a study for David's Death of Socrates (31.45), which hangs in the Metropolitan's European Paintings Galleries. The painting depicts the philosopher in prison in 399 BC. Sentenced to death for corrupting the youth of Athens, he pauses to address his followers before drinking the hemlock. This sheet is a study for the pose and drapery of Crito, a wealthy Athenian disciple who, in the painting, sits by Socrates' side and beseeches him not to drink the poison. The grid drawn in black chalk, known as squaring, would have assisted the artist in transferring the design from paper to canvas.

Other studies for the painting were acquired by the museum in 2013 (2013.59) and 2015 (2015.149).

(Perrin Stein, July 2017)

The Death of Socrates is one of the purest examples of the Neoclassical style, in which the look of the classical past is fused with stories of moral rectitude.







In this highly choreographed scene, David presents the imprisoned Greek philosopher pausing before accepting the goblet of poison from a cupbearer who cannot bear to watch. With a calm that contrasts with the clear distress of his disciples, Socrates expounds upon his belief in the immortality of the soul.







Seated at the foot of the bed, with head bent and eyes closed, is Plato, who was not present in Socrates’ prison cell, but who described the scene in Phaedo, one of his Dialogues.

This drawing is one of numerous studies for David’s masterly painting in the Louvre. The subject, drawn from Roman Republican history, describes the return of the sons of Brutus for burial. It was Brutus himself (flourished 510 B.C.) who condemned his sons to death for treason.

Conceived in the years leading up to the Revolution, The Lictors Bringing Brutus the Bodies of His Sons was not exhibited until 1789, after the storming of the Bastille. The painting’s subject, part of the legend of the founding of the first Roman Republic following the overthrow of a corrupt king, would resonate with French audiences as political change transformed their own country.







Roman consul Lucius Junius Brutus, seated in the shadows at lower left, discovered his sons embroiled in a plot to restore the monarchy and ordered their execution; lictors (Roman officers) have arrived bearing their corpses. To explore every psychological nuance of this wrenching story, David made a great many studies. In these early ideas for the composition, Brutus’s household appears crowded, compressed, and chaotic.

Before putting brush to canvas, David would work out his ideas on paper, each drawing a distinct step in an extended process of experimentation and refinement. In this compositional study, and another hanging nearby, the cast of characters from earlier versions has been reduced. Brutus broods in shadow while his wife Vitellia, illuminated in a pool of light, enacts a full-blown expression of grief. The artist has added a curtained wall that separates the domestic sphere at right from the gruesome scene of the corpses being carried in.







Certain elements, like the cap with "liberté" inscribed on its strap on a pole at left, are drawn in a different color ink. These may have been added by David after the flight of the French king in 1791 to retroactively give his composition a revolutionary gloss.

It was David’s practice to begin by depicting his figures nude, presumably to ensure that the anatomy and proportions were correct before adding clothing. Here, he studies the complex grouping of Brutus’s wife and daughters, using wash to capture the strong fall of light. The superimposed grid was a method of transferring the forms to another sheet.







He would later revise their poses, the moment of inspiration captured in a schematic red chalk sketch hanging nearby.

This sheet is one of many studies David made for The Lictors Bringing Brutus the Bodies of His Sons (Musée du Louvre, Paris), completed on the eve of the French Revolution and exhibited shortly after the fall of the Bastille in 1789. For a compositional study in The Met’s collection, see 2006.264.

The subject, drawn from Roman history, found great resonance in the context of contemporary events. The canvas depicts an episode from the life of Lucius Junius Brutus, who put an end to the brutal regime of Tarquin, Rome's last king, and established the first Roman Republic, only later to find his two sons embroiled in a royalist conspiracy. True to his political convictions, Brutus condemned his sons to death. The novelty of David's painting is its focus, not on the executions but on the wrenching domestic aftermath.

The composition’s tripartite concept features Brutus alone in the left foreground; a more dramatic group of figures including his wife and daughters to the right; and the lictors carrying the corpses of the sons in the left background. The group of Brutus’ wife and daughters underwent many changes as David planned the canvas. As was his frequent practice, he began by depicting the figures nude, presumably to ensure that the anatomy and proportions were correct before adding clothing. After many iterations, David was still not satisfied with his depiction of the mother-daughter group. In early versions, Brutus’s wife, in her all-consuming grief, neither sees nor attends to her daughters. They are physically unified but emotionally unconnected. David’s solution, it would appear, came from an ancient relief of Silenus supporting a collapsing maenad. David captured this new idea quickly in red chalk, an unusual medium for him, but perhaps it was all he had at hand when inspiration struck. In a faint like the ancient maenad, Brutus’s daughter is held up only by her mother’s strong grip. The second daughter now stands, leaning into her mother, her view of her brothers partially blocked by her own hands. This solution encapsulates the mother’s dual role, at once victim and protector. We know nothing of the early provenance of the sheet, but the paper bears clear signs of having been folded into eighths, perhaps in order to be mailed in a letter.

David had earlier depicted the grieving nurse on the right side of The Lictors Bringing Brutus the Bodies of His Sons with her head thrown back and tearing her clothes to expose her chest, a classical motif of female lamentation. However, he eventually opted for this more restrained pose. She covers her face with drapery, hiding from the viewer the sight of her features distorted by grief.

Although small in scale, this oil sketch is perhaps David’s darkest vision of the subject of the ancient Roman consul Brutus, who condemned his sons to death for betraying the newly founded republic. Contrary to his usual practice of moving the most graphic violence offstage as he progressed toward his final composition, the artist here inserts the gruesome detail of the lictors (Roman officers) holding aloft pikes bearing the heads of the two sons. It was an idea he would jettison in the final work.

David approached contemporary events in much the same way he did subjects from ancient history, by making multiple studies of figures and figural groups, first nude, then clothed, tweaking their poses and props.







Here, two sheets affixed side-by-side record different stages of the process. The pair, Edmond Dubois-Crancé and Maximilien Robespierre, appear right of center in the finished drawing hanging nearby, their positions swapped. The two figures indicated in pen-and-ink contour at far right were probably traced from another sketch in an attempt to gauge placement and overlap.

In this cinematic vision of patriotic fervor, David commemorates a foundational event of the French Revolution. On June 20, 1789, representatives of various social classes gathered on a tennis court at Versailles and, in a challenge to the absolute authority of the king, pledged to draft a constitution.







The storm raging outside suggests the chaotic state of the French nation, while the emphatic gestures of the participants read as a refracted echo of David’s 1785 painting The Oath of the Horatii, thus ennobling a contemporary event by recasting it in the language of the classical past. The drawing was intended as a study for a painting to hang in the newly formed National Assembly, to be funded by public subscription, but the fast pace of political change derailed these plans.

The Revolution presented a challenge to French artists: is political transformation better portrayed through realism or allegory? David fused the two in this recently discovered study.







To represent a populace liberated from oppression, an array of figures—some nude, others in classical dress—are shown unshackled from their bonds and greeting their liberator as he descends the gangplank of a docked ship. Behind them, a carefully rendered topographical view identifies the setting as Nantes, a city on the Loire River in eastern France.







The image is constructed from several pieces of paper, cut and reassembled, as David made changes to the composition. Although he devoted months to making studies for this project, he would never complete the painting, having turned his attention to The Oath of the Tennis Court.

The political activist Jean Paul Marat was assassinated in his bath on July 13, 1793. In addition to depicting the murder scene in a painting, David made this posthumous record of his friend’s features, capturing the weight of the man’s lifeless head in a dense web of ink lines. The haunting representation shows Marat with his eyes still slightly open and his lips parted, as if poised to speak.

David here adopts the classical form of the triumphal procession, an elaborate ritual first organized for victorious generals in the ancient Roman Republic. His depiction celebrates the bravery of the French people who rose up to overthrow the monarchy. In a hybrid assembly, a chariot bearing allegorical figures is joined by historical characters and a band of contemporary martyrs, all displaying their wounds in dramatic gestures.







By juxtaposing the ancient Roman consul Brutus, brandishing the paper that condemns his traitorous sons to death, with the Revolutionary hero Jean Paul Marat, kneeling and baring his chest, David is fusing not only two historical periods, but two aspects of his own career: the history painter and the artist of the Revolution.

After the National Convention proclaimed France a republic in 1792, there was a strong impetus to reimagine many aspects of daily life to reflect new egalitarian principles. Clothing, which had been a key means to distinguish social class and privilege before the revolution, was one area targeted for change.







In 1794 David produced a group of designs for civil, military, and judicial uniforms, a project reflecting his political clout during these years, as well as his training as a history painter. The designs are eclectic in influence, with nods to the styles of antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance. They are also exceptionally vibrant and confident in their execution—indicative, presumably, of the artist’s enthusiasm.

It was during a period of imprisonment in 1795 that David created one of his most singular and haunting achievements as a draftsman: a series of portraits of his fellow prisoners—all former allies of Maximilien Robespierre, a Revolutionary statesman who had led the bloody period known as the Terror.







In contrast to his usual schematic technique, David here uses careful ink lines and subtle gradations of wash to record his subjects with psychological intensity. They seem to face their uncertain futures with a mix of bravery and apprehension. The medallion format, associated with antiquity, suggests an urge to memorialize, but in this context it also evokes confinement.

The idea for David’s first ambitious history painting of the post-revolutionary era, The Intervention of the Sabine Women, came to him in a prison cell in 1794. The subject—focused on the reconciliation of warring tribes—is taken from Roman history, but the painting was clearly intended as a commentary on the fractured state of French society.







Three years after the abduction of their daughters and sisters, the Sabine men attacked Rome in retaliation. Hersilia, daughter of the Sabine king, occupies the center of the composition, her pale arms extended in a gesture that immobilizes the fighting. She is encircled by Sabine women who rush onto the battlefield and thrust their babies before the soldiers as proof of their familial bonds.

In David’s 1799 painting, The Intervention of the Sabine Women, it is not weapons and bloodshed that end a battle between warring tribes, but a woman’s emotional entreaty. Across the dense melee of figures, soldiers drop their bloody daggers and remove their helmets, as David catalogues the various gestures that signal a peace beginning to take hold.







The cavalry general re-sheathing his sword was an element that was added late in the design process. On this sheet, David drew two quick sketches, working out the details of the pose.

In his early studies for The Intervention of the Sabine Women, David had envisioned the male warriors clothed, a choice he later renounced in favor of what he considered to be the greater authenticity of classical nudity. Thus, the detailed drapery studies that he made for major figures in his history paintings are in this case all for female characters: Hersilia and her supporting cast of young mothers.







Tales of beautiful French society women vying to pose for certain figures have become part of the picture’s legend. The filmy draperies worn by David’s Sabine women and the unstructured white gowns that became fashionable during this period do share a similar elegant simplicity.

By the dawn of the nineteenth century, it must have been evident to David that his path to glory would depend on Napoleon’s favor and patronage. A chance to prove himself came with the commission for a suite of four large canvases depicting the official events around Napoleon’s coronation as emperor, which took place in the cathedral of Notre-Dame in Paris on December 2, 1804, and marked the transformation of France into an empire.







This compositional study has long been considered the product of two hands, with the architectural and decorative elements by David’s friend, Ignace Degotti, a set designer for the Paris Opéra.

This compositional study shows that David fully understood the picture’s essential purpose: like the ceremony itself, it was meant to buttress Napoleon’s claim to authority. Merging documentary and propaganda, the image presents the new sociopolitical order in the best possible light, with all the luxurious trappings of past regimes.







The seated pope looks on weakly while Napoleon, with a brash confidence, crowns himself. It was only when the canvas was nearly done that the decision was made to replace this striking motif with a less provocative action, one which had followed moments later: Napoleon placing a second crown on his wife Josephine’s head.

In addition to glorifying Napoleon in his new role, the opulent coronation ceremony that David was assigned to commemorate heralded a new social order built around the imperial court. It was essential, therefore, that viewers could readily identify all the attendees. To this end, David made a great many portrait studies from live models. Here, he captures Josephine’s vulnerability, with her bent head, exposed neck, and pale skin set off by a corkscrew of dark hair falling from her diadem. In contrast to the heavy makeup and velvet cape she wore to the ceremony, she is pictured here in a simple dress and appears closer to her true age of forty-one.

In order to present his authority as divinely sanctioned, Napoleon arranged to have Pope Pius VII travel to Paris to take part in his coronation. The relationship was an uneasy one, as the Roman Catholic Church had only recently been reintegrated into French society in 1801.







This group of three religious figures, which would become three bishops in the final version, occupied a central place in the composition, as a backdrop to the imperial couple. The men’s importance, both visual and symbolic, is reflected in the care David took with this study, finely detailed and modeled in gray wash.

After completing The Coronation, David was directed to depict an event staged on the Champ-de-Mars, a large open space in front of the Ecole Militaire, in which the French troops enacted an oath of loyalty to Napoleon. The ceremony involved exchanging the flags from the republican campaigns for new regimental banners referred to as imperial "eagles."







This recently discovered oil sketch contains layers of studies—visible in X-radiograph and infrared images—that shed light on the evolution of the composition. In his typical process, David first sketched the figures nude in black chalk. Details of costume and chromatic effects were then explored with dabs and ribbons of oil paint.

For The Distribution of the Eagles, David made many studies of individual soldiers. Here, the chalk sketch of the nude figure is visible below the semitransparent rendering of his uniform. On the canvas, this man plays an important role: he anchors the lower right corner of the composition, while his gesture and backward glance suggest that he is leading a larger group.







Male bodies molded into expressions of shared patriotism, especially the gestures of oath taking, are a recurring theme in David’s oeuvre, from the ancient Roman legend of The Oath of the Horatii to the revolutionary Oath of the Tennis Court. Here, the theme adapts effortlessly to fit Napoleon’s need for expressions of military allegiance.

This sketchbook contains studies for many individual figures in The Distribution of the Eagles, including two for the empress Josephine. Her ghostly presence in an X-radiograph of the oil sketch hanging nearby shows that David had planned to show her seated behind Napoleon. Following their divorce, he was ordered to remove her from the painting.

In the waning years of Napoleon’s power, David found himself in an uncomfortable position: bearing the title "first painter," but lacking the influence that would typically accompany it. His efforts to obtain commissions for the decoration of imperial palaces were rebuffed, but his finished drawings from the time offer a window onto the evolution of his style.







By 1812 his art had become quieter and more contained. Here, he depicts the goddess Venus, injured by the Greek warrior Diomedes while trying to protect her son, the Trojan hero Aeneas. She has ascended Mount Olympus to show her wound to Jupiter and beseech his help. Her pose of humble supplication stands in contrast to the cool and judgmental demeanor of Juno and Minerva behind her.

In the oft-depicted tale of Cupid and Psyche, the son of the goddess Venus falls in love with a beautiful mortal and spirits her away to an isolated palace, where he visits her at night but steals away each morning before dawn to conceal his identity. David’s version pairs the sleeping, postcoital Psyche with the fully awake Cupid, who prepares to extricate himself from the weight of his slumbering partner.







David’s Cupid takes the form of a smirking teenager, portrayed with a naturalism that was considered jarring at the time—not only in juxtaposition to Psyche’s idealized appearance, but also in its rejection of le beau idéal, a notion of polished classical beauty that had been promoted by the German art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann.

As his commissions for Napoleon dried up, David returned to a mythological painting he had begun planning fifteen years earlier as a pendant (pairing) to the Intervention of the Sabine Women. It depicts the legendary Spartan king Leonidas, who would perish with three hundred soldiers at Thermopylae, where they were vastly outnumbered by the Persian army of Xerxes.







In this working drawing, the artist’s evolving ideas appear laid down in a rush, perhaps intermittently, progressing from a pale initial sketch to emphatic revisions in a darker shade. Seemingly oblivious to the tumult swirling around him, Leonidas maintains a statuesque stillness, lost in contemplation of his soldiers’ impending sacrifice.

When Napoleon, years before, had seen David’s sketches for a painting of the ill-fated Spartan king Leonidas, he admonished the artist not to waste his time depicting the vanquished. But in the late years of the Empire, when David revived the project, the mood in the French capital had grown dark, and military defeats were mounting. In 1813, the year inscribed on this sheet, David’s son Eugène was injured during the French army’s German campaign.







David shows no bloodshed, highlighting instead the resolve of the outnumbered warriors in the face of impending death. He thus suggests metrics beyond the binary outcomes of the battlefield. For Leonidas, as for the contemporary martyrs David had memorialized during the Revolution, patriotic sacrifice represented a path to eternal glory.

The drawings David made during his exile in Brussels are often self-referential, containing echoes of figures and themes from earlier periods of his career. This cropped male figure, gazing out with a troubled expression, is a near repetition of a turbaned plague victim in the foreground of an altarpiece painted at the outset of David’s career, for a hospital chapel in Marseille. With a spare, shallow setting and a few accessories, his role has been transformed into that of a prisoner.







The motif of the noble prisoner runs throughout David’s body of work, from The Death of Socrates that hung at the Salon of 1787 to the portraits he drew of fellow former deputies during his own imprisonment in 1795.

Each of the four late drawings on view here features figures in a cropped and compressed format. David is now using drawing not to plan paintings, but to cultivate the discordant effects of improvisation. In this case, he seems inspired by the legend of Phryne, a Greek courtesan accused of "impiety" but subsequently absolved by the judges on account of her beauty.







Unlike the sculptural bodies in David’s Neoclassical paintings of the 1780s, these figures have a new flatness that, along with their corkscrews of curly black hair, give them a look that recalls ancient Greek vase painting.

During his final decade, spent in exile in Brussels, David produced a large body of enigmatic drawings: expressive partial figures, depicted singly or in groups, without clear narrative or function. In a recently discovered 1818 letter to a student, David describes this body of work with pride. Begun as "caprices," or drawings made following no particular logic, they increasingly took on a seriousness of purpose. Difficult to decipher today, they evoke the compelling characters that had peopled his history paintings, filtered through the distorting lens of memory.

In this drawing made in exile, David recasts figures from a major history painting he had left behind in Paris, Leonidas at Thermopylae (1814). The truncated bodies have become fragments fused into a new whole, their emotional states carried over, but now occupying a visual field devoid of spatial references.

Following the definitive defeat of Napoleon and the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy, David would spend the final decade of his life in exile in Brussels. There, he established a studio and continued to work, but his drawings reveal shifts in his practice and interests.







This touching portrait of his daughter Pauline, with a gentle and affectionate gaze, re-creates the composition of an earlier painted portrait. Inscribed "done from memory," the sheet evokes both his fondness for his absent daughter and, through her jewelry, the family’s former status in the imperial court.

The flip side of the portraits David drew from memory during his exile are those drawn from living models, infused with a straightforward naturalism. This double portrait of the artist’s daughter and granddaughter was made when Pauline visited Brussels to care for her convalescing parents in 1821.

David’s health was failing in 1825 when his son and daughter-in-law came to Brussels to care for him. The concerned expression of Anne-Therèse and the low vantage point of this highly finished double portrait both suggest the perspective of an invalid. An inscription on the back of the sheet in Eugène’s hand reads, "last drawing by my poor father."