Jacques-Louis David

Jacques-Louis David was a French painter, born August 30, 1748, in Paris, and died December 29, 1825, in Brussels, Belgium, where he lived in exile after Napoleon's fall. He is regarded as the most celebrated French artist of his day and the principal figure of Neoclassicism, defining the movement's severe linear style and morally serious classical subjects as a deliberate reaction against the Rococo he had trained within. David's Oath of the Horatii, shown at the 1785 Salon, became Neoclassicism's defining statement and was read as an allegory of civic duty on the eve of the French Revolution, during which David served briefly as its artistic director, painting its leaders and martyrs including The Death of Marat. Napoleon Bonaparte named him court painter in 1804, and David produced the era's most enduring propagandistic images of the emperor.