The story’s main image: an 18th-century self-portrait showing a painter seated in an upholstered wooden chair in front of a light gray wall. He’s looking straight ahead, directly at the viewer, with his body turned to the left of the picture. He has brown hair, which hangs down just past his ears, and dark eyes. His mouth is closed, and he has a scar on his cheek. He is wearing a dark gray coat with pinkish-burgundy trim over a white shirt, and he has a white bow tied around his neck. He holds a single paintbrush in one hand and more brushes and a palette in the other. There are smears of red, white, pink, and gray paint on the palette, and there are some marks on the wall behind him.
Here is a confession: Since my early 20s, I have been in love with a terrorist.
This is him. My No. 1 guy, my problematic fave: Jacques-Louis David, painter of the French Revolution and everything that came after.
In the 1780s, David rocketed to the forefront of European painting with a severe new style of depiction. His ambitions led him all the way into a new government, which he served with lethal devotion.
It’s a self-portrait with the usual attributes. Brush in one hand, palette in the other.
His face is still youthful, but his eyes have seen it all: the execution of a king, the execution of a queen.
And the background does not disclose the setting: a Paris prison cell where he was confined in 1794, once the Reign of Terror he championed — he facilitated — came to an end.
A painting of Socrates, about to drink the hemlock that will kill him. He sits on what appears to be a bed, near the center of the picture, surrounded by people draped in colorful cloth. Some look at him, while others look away or hold their heads in their hands. He wears a white cloth that bares his chest and stomach. With his left hand, he points toward the ceiling; with his right hand, he reaches for a cup, which is held by a person in a red cloth whose head is turned, and whose eyes are hidden. In the background, on the left, an archway opens onto a stairwell, where a few more people are standing.
Like many great romances, my 20-year affair with David has been a tortured one.
When I was young I was gripped by the zeal of this painter-politician, even if I was a little scared of where it led. Here was an artist who didn’t just represent the world, but actually changed it.
He made moral clarity an artform unto itself. His art was serious: deadly serious.
Honor. Martyrdom. Dying for principle — dying and also killing — on the bleeding edge of history. Yet when the political winds shifted, he seemed to betray every one of his high-minded ideals.
Many young people have dreams of revolution, and I had my share. But David’s dreams also made me shudder.
A photograph of a museumgoer wearing a quilted blue jacket and facing a very large painting. The painting depicts the coronation of Napoleon, in Notre-Dame Cathedral, with a richly dressed crowd in attendance. The museumgoer stands off to the right.
His treacherous genius has been on view, these last few months, in a once-a-generation retrospective at the Musée du Louvre.
The very building that his fellow revolutionaries had transformed from a palace to a museum, in the same year they lopped off the king’s head.
David was a revolutionary whose nerves failed him. An uncompromising artist, and also an utter sellout.
Back to the story’s main image.
Who was he, really, underneath it all?
As long as I have wrestled with history’s most dangerous painter — I have stared him down, eye to eye, for half my life — I have never been able to say. And maybe he couldn’t either.
A photograph of a large-scale painting — a Roman scene — in a museum gallery room.
The young painter made his name with grandly scaled tableaux, often inspired by the Roman republic, of men going to war or pledging their honor.
A closer view of the painting: In the center stands a bearded man draped in gray and red cloth. He’s holding three swords with their blades facing down, and he’s facing three helmeted men who reach out their arms to him from the left side of the picture. On the right sit several women and children — leaning on one another, apparently in consolation.
In the mid-1780s, the waning years of France’s ancien régime, David painted this: the “Oath of the Horatii,” an icy manifesto, 14 feet wide, of martial patriotism.
For decades, the country’s hottest painters had favored ornament, whimsy, courtly romance. Count him out. David’s young men, ready to die, give us something new: hard bodies. Cold spaces. Stern lessons in virtue.
But not all virtues. Not piety, and certainly not love. The virtues are civic: rectitude, duty, sacrifice. For these ideals, you must be ready to give everything.
A detailed sketch of a large, boisterous crowd gathered on an indoor tennis court — a big room with a high ceiling. In the center, a man stands on a table. He faces forward, raising his right hand and holding a piece of paper in his left hand. Along the left and right sides of the room, up near the ceiling, there are rows of open windows, where more people look in and curtains billow.
Comes 1789, comes summer. The bad harvests and the wild privileges have grown unbearable. Amid the bread riots, a suggestion from the queen: Perhaps you might try cake instead?
It’s June 20, and we’re in Versailles. The commoners summoned by King Louis XVI have proclaimed themselves the country’s rightful legislature, but they panic that Louis’s troops are after them.
So they assemble instead on a tennis court, and they swear an oath: Until they have a constitution, they’re not disbanding.
By July 14, when insurgents in Paris storm the local prison, a new political era has dawned.
The revolutionaries call for a painter. It could only be him.
A scrolling display of historical images — mostly black-and-white prints on yellowed pages — showing scenes from the French revolution: fighting in the streets, a trial, guillotines. There are also, amid these, a portrait of Jacques-Louis David and a sketch of Marie Antoinette.
The French Revolution was underway, and David leapt out of the studio and into the action.
He joined the Jacobins, led by his friend Maximilien de Robespierre.
He was no great orator. He had a speech impediment, made worse by a swollen cheek, the result of a youthful fencing accident. But he had other ways of being heard.
He went into public office. In 1792, David won a seat in the elected revolutionary assembly — France’s first government without a monarch at its head.
History was moving faster than his brush. During the Terror he put his signature on paintings of young martyrs — and also on arrest warrants.
David became a member of two of the new government’s most fearsome committees. He was in charge of interrogations.
And when the fate of the king — the king who had once been his patron — came before the revolutionary assembly, David did not hesitate.
“Louis the Last” was guilty, on 33 counts. The painter voted to sentence the king to death, with no reprieve.
A photograph of a painting in a darkened room in a museum.
Dictator of the arts, David in 1793 headed off any royalist revanchism with the greatest work of propaganda ever painted: his friend, the assassinated journalist Jean-Paul Marat, slouched in the bath like Christ off the cross.
A closer view of the painting: A dead or dying man sits in a bath, slumped over to his right side. His head is wrapped in a white cloth, his eyes are closed and he has a gash in his chest. The bath water is bloody, and the tub itself is draped in green and white cloth. The man holds a blood-stained piece of paper in his left hand and a quill in his right. There is a bloody knife with a white handle on the ground beside him. Next to the bath is a wooden box, with another quill, an inkpot and some papers on top of it. There is some writing on the side of the box, including the words “À Marat” and “David.”
He debuted it here, at the Louvre, on October 16, 1793 — mere hours after Marie Antoinette met the razor.
“Year Two,” it says on the box. His friends had devised a whole new calendar for this new age. In that year (1793-94) David was busy staging parades and festivals, and would finish no painting but this one.
David had reached the summit of cultural power. He’d refashioned art into an instrument of republican virtue.
But it only lasted a year. Robespierre was arrested in July 1794. David had vowed, like a principled Greek or Roman, to die alongside his friend. “I’ll drink the hemlock with you,” the painter swore.
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But on the day of the coup, who could have supposed, David ghosted him.
He was arrested, all the same, a week later. Imprisoned in the Hôtel des Fermes Générales in 1794, he sat before the mirror — and depicted himself with zero political attributes.
It is a self-portrait of the most inscrutable spirit. His mouth is ringed with gray stubble, and his misshaped cheek is in slight shadow.
David is now 46. But his unkempt hair and searching eyes belong to a man half his age.
Look, too, at how he grips his brush and palette. The hands: so taut, so strained. The thumb, pressing down so hard the nailbed turns white.
Interrogations, persecutions, denunciations, executions … did I do that? The time of politics is over. He is anxious to work. Anxious to paint his innocence — and the innocence of painting itself.
A detailed sketch of a Roman scene: A bearded man sits in shadow in the foreground, holding a piece of paper in his left hand and raising his right hand to his head. Behind him, other men carry out bodies covered by sheets. Off to his side, a woman raises her arms and moves toward the bodies and the men carrying them. She appears to be in distress, as do several others who are clustered around her.
How the world turns. In the run-up to the revolution, David began his most celebrated picture of Roman virtue. It’s a scene of a family in public life, in the first days of a fragile political age.
The new republic is not yet stable, the consul knows, and a conspiracy is afoot to bring back the monarchy.
The consul finds out. He has the conspirators arrested. They are tried, tortured, executed.
A finished version of the sketch seen above: The composition and the figures in it are much the same, but here they are rendered in colorful paint.
The trouble is: The schemers include two of his own sons.
Their mother wails in anguish as the slaves bring their bodies through.
But their father refuses even to turn his head. David’s moral is pitiless: For virtue, for the republic, you must be ready to sacrifice your children.
A sketch of a woman on a yellowed, widely gridded sheet of paper. She is draped in a white cloth and stretching her arms out to her sides. Her head is turned to her left. Beneath her, in small letters, is some writing in script.
But after the Terror, after his fall, languishing in another prison cell, he starts dreaming up a big new painting on an uncommon theme.
Close-up of a painting showing the same woman, now surrounded by other figures: women and children, and men holding shields and swords.
It’s going to be an appeal for peace, depicting brave women interceding between the warring Romans and Sabines.
A slightly wider view, showing women holding children up high above their heads, and men holding spears.
They are holding their babies aloft on the frontline. Think of your families, they’re pleading. Look at your children and stop this fight.
The full painting: women and their children; men — many of them nude save for helmets and neck shawls — wielding their weapons; horses; and a large building in the background.
The message has changed completely. Is any cause worth dying for, now?
A photograph of a painting in a museum.
Because by 1799, when he finished the “Sabines,” a new political order had taken shape. David saw it coming. He was not too pure to paint it.
A closer view of the painting, which shows Napoleon astride a rearing white horse. He wears military dress, including a bicorne hat, and he’s wrapped in an orange cape. His left hand is gloved and holds the horse’s reins; his right hand is bare and points ahead. Behind him, soldiers push a cannon and a French flag waves. Mountains rise in the background.
For the next 15 years, David would employ his gift for propaganda to the glory of Napoleon Bonaparte. The painter who’d voted to kill a king would exalt an emperor who put a crown on his own head.
The fallen republic’s artist-in-chief became the new empire’s finest spin doctor.
When you lose something, when the incentives change, do you give up your beliefs? Did you ever believe them at all?
Many historians and critics have described David’s jailhouse self-portrait as a craven rebrand. The later Napoleonic pictures were the proof: This was an insincere mea culpa to save his career, and his head.
As always with David, the painting’s more dangerous than that. What I saw in Paris this winter, staring him down again after all these decades, is that this self-portrait calls the very idea of self-knowledge into doubt.
A different version of the story’s main image: It’s the same picture, but the colors are warmer and there appears to be less texture.
I couldn’t see it until now. On all my previous visits, David’s self-portrait looked more like this: jaundiced, heavy with oxidized varnish. For the Louvre’s current show, it’s been especially cleaned.
The cleaning has revealed much freer brushwork than I’d realized was there.
In the quickly sketched upholstery of his chair.
In the softly touched curls of his unpowdered hair.
There are newly revealed brown gashes, at left: probably where he was cleaning his brushes in the isolation of the cell. It all feels faster than before, more agitated, less certain.
And, for the first time ever, I could see the color in the face. The yellow daub above the arched right eyebrow. The touches of blue elaborating his undereyes. And the intense black of his pupils: Never has the stare unsettled me more.
A photograph of the story’s main image, framed and hanging in a darkened room in a museum.
What do those eyes say? In the dark gallery of the Louvre’s David exhibition, in the shadow of his propaganda, the gaze appears so intense and searching that it betrays an utter cluelessness. A loss of self.
He was never a real ideologue, David. His letters give no suggestion of deep political thinking. Maybe he just liked power. But look at what is happening as he tries, desperately, to propagandize for himself.
He’s trying, so hard, to confirm an identity — David, painter; never David, politician. And he seems incapable of reaching any interiority at all.
Back to the story’s main image.
It is that self-blindness I have come to value most in David, my deepest and wrongest love. The most influential painter of his time, all alone in his cell, cannot penetrate his own heart.
It can happen, you know, when politics becomes a bloodsport. The legislator must vote absolutely: aye or nay, life or death. But the painter — here is his power, and also his tragedy — can give a third answer: I just don’t know.