Jacques-Louis David
David is a monument. “Father of the French School,” “regenerator of painting,” he created images that still haunt our collective imagination today: Marat assassinated, Bonaparte crossing the Alps, the Coronation of Napoleon… It is through the filter of his paintings that we imagine the great hours of the Revolution and the Napoleonic Empire, and in his portraits that the society of that time is relived.
On the occasion of the bicentenary of his death in exile in Brussels in 1825, the Louvre, which houses the world’s largest collection of the artist’s paintings and drawings, offers a new perspective on a personality and work of exceptional richness and diversity. The exhibition highlights the inventiveness and expressive power of the painting of an artist who created images that still inhabit our collective imagination today.
The exhibition, which covers the long career of an artist who lived through six political regimes and actively participated in the Revolution, brings together around a hundred exceptional loans, including the imposing fragment of the Oath of the Tennis Court (on loan from the Louvre Museum to the Palace of Versailles) and the original version of the famous Marat Assassinated (Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels), the height of his art.
