artnet.com
Search the whole artnet database
 
 
  Services  | The Grove Dictionary of Art

  Research Library groveart.com Artist Biographies
Materials and Techniques
Styles and Movements
  
 

David, Jacques-Louis

(b Paris, 30 Aug 1748; d Brussels, 29 Dec 1825). French painter and draughtsman. He was the most prominent and influential painter of the Neo-classical movement in France (see NEO-CLASSICISM). In the 1780s he created a style of austere and ethical painting that perfectly captured the moral climate of the last years of the ancien régime. Later, as an active revolutionary, he put his art at the service of the new French Republic and for a time was virtual dictator of the arts. He was imprisoned after the fall from power of Maximilien de Robespierre but on his release became captivated by the personality of Napoleon I and developed an Empire style in which warm Venetian colour played a major role. Following the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy in 1816, David went into exile in Brussels, where he continued to paint but was regarded as something of an anachronism. He had a huge number of pupils, and his influence was felt (both positively and negatively) by the majority of French 19th-century painters. He was a revolutionary artist in both a technical and a political sense. His compositional innovations effected a complete rupture with Rococo fantasy; he is considered the greatest single figure in European painting between the late Rococo and the Romantic era.

There are more than 45,000 articles in The Grove Dictionary of Art. To access the rest of this article, including the bibliography, subscribe to www.groveart.com. To find out more about this subject, click on a related article below and subscribe to www.groveart.com
  Reproduced by kind permission of Macmillan Publishers Limited, publishers of The Grove Dictionary of Art.
  © Copyright 2000 Macmillan Publishers Limited.
site map  about us  contact us  investor relations  services  terms & conditions artnet.com | artnet.de | artnet.fr
   ©2009 artnet - The art world online. All rights reserved. artnet is a registered trademark of artnet Worldwide Corporation, New York, NY.  


search artists: A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z