Louvre devotes a major retrospective in the Hall Napoléon to Jacques-Louis David, the first in more than thirty years. A pivotal figure between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, David was not only the leading voice of French Neoclassicism but also an artist who intertwined his career with the political upheavals of his age, ultimately becoming Napoleon’s official painter. The exhibition brings together more than one hundred works including paintings and drawings from French and international collections. From the fragment of the Serment du Jeu de Paume, a pictorial manifesto of the Revolution, to The Death of Marat in Brussels, symbol of the Jacobin season, up to the Napoleonic masterpieces such as The Coronation and Napoleon Crossing the Saint Bernard. David transformed the protagonists of his time into political icons, shaping an imagery that still defines the revolutionary and imperial epic. Curated by Sébastien Allard and Côme Fabre with Anne Gobet, the exhibition traces the constant interplay in David’s work between political engagement and aesthetic research. The setup by Juan-Felipe Alarcón and graphic design by Philippe Apeloig guide visitors through the successive regimes he lived under: monarchy, revolution, directory, empire and exile. The result is the portrait of a painter who, alongside his loyalty to Napoleon, also left unforgettable images of the new society born from the Revolution. This retrospective offers a chance to reconsider David beyond the label of “painter of the regime”, revealing the complexity of a master who used the language of antiquity to speak to his present and who placed his art at the service of ideals as powerful as they were contradictory.
