May 12, 2022 57est is the large drawing The Oath of
the Tennis Court, completed by May
1791, and on which he may have been
ruminating as early as March 1790, sev-
eral months before being awarded the
commission. Preparatory for a canvas
intended to be twenty- two feet high by
thirty- two wide (and abandoned early
on), David’s drawing commemorated
the event on June 20, 1789, when 630
representatives of the Third Estate,
newly reconstituted as deputies of the
National Assembly, found themselves
locked out of their meeting place at the
hôtel des Menus- Plaisirs in Versailles
and repaired to the nearby indoor
royal tennis court, where they swore
“not to separate” and to
reassemble “wherever
necessary until the Con-
stitution of the kingdom
is established.”
To treat an episode
of recent political his-
tory with the grandeur
of history painting—and
without recourse to alle-
gory—was unprecedented
in eighteenth- century
France. David shows Jean
Sylvain Bailly, the astron-
omer and mayor of Paris,
standing on a makeshift
table as he proclaims the
oath to the assembled dep-
uties. Hundreds of men—
some fifty of whom are
identifiable—raise their
arms in fraternal exalta-
tion. Edmond Louis Alexis
Dubois- Crancé, who had
proposed David to the
Jacobins for this commis-
sion, is shown standing on
a chair in the foreground
at right. Robespierre, in
front of him, raises his head
in rapture and clutches at
his chest. Bertrand Barère
de Vieuzac, seated cross-
legged to Bailly’s left,
writes an eyewitness ac-
count of the oath- taking
for his journal, Le Point du Jour. Jo-
seph Martin d’Auch, at the far right, re-
fusing to swear allegiance, is protected
by the deputy next to him, who urges
calm by raising a finger to his lips. At
the far left, the infirm Michel- René
Maupetit de La Mayenne is brought
in on a chair supported by a muscular
Parisian wearing a Phrygian bonnet.^9
Placed prominently in the foreground,
three ecclesiastics come together in an
ecumenical embrace: the abbé Henri-
Baptiste Grégoire—one of the first
members of the clergy to join the Third
Estate—places his hands on the shoul-
ders of the white- robed Carthusian
Dom Christophe- Antoine Gerle and
the Calvinist pastor Jean Paul Rabaut
Saint- Étienne.
David had not, of course, been pres-
ent at the royal tennis court at Versailles
in June 1789, although he witnessed
the civic oath taken by the deputiesat the National Assembly in February
1790 and made studies in Versailles in
preparation for this commission. At the
lower left of the drawing he includes a
racket, a basket, and some stray tennis
balls, although he gives no indication
that the walls of the indoor court were
painted black so that players could see
the ball more easily. When David ex-
hibited The Oath of the Tennis Court
at the Salon in August 1791, he noted,
in a disclaimer, “The author has not in-
tended to portray the members of the
Assembly accurately.” Yet the supreme
accomplishment of this drawing, as
well as the related sheet of fourteen
preparatory studies from the MuséeNational des Châteaux de Versailles—
in the center of which David writes, in
a note to self, “Some of those arriving
may have kept their hats on inadver-
tently”—is not verisimilitude but con-
viction and authenticity. At the right
edge of the Sheet of Fourteen Stud-
ies where the artist has tested his pen
and brush before embarking on these
prodigiously animated groups, his ex-
citement and expectation are palpable
(see illustration on page 55). These are
virtuoso performances that convey no-
bility, affection, and optimism. It is not
known whether the twenty- one- year-
old William Wordsworth, who arrived
in Paris at the end of November 1791,
visited the Salon, which closed early
the following month. (He was intro-
duced to the Jacobins and went to the
National Assembly.) But the lines in
book 11 of his Prelude echo the joy and
hope in David’s drawing: “Bliss was
it in that dawn to be alive/But to be
young was very heaven!”Unlike many of the principal figures
memorialized in The Oath of the Ten-
nis Court, David survived the Rev-
olution’s rapidly changing political
fortunes, but only just. Too ill to attend
the National Convention on Sunday, 9
Thermidor Year II (July 27, 1794)—on
the advice of his doctor, he absentedhimself for the day in order to admin-
ister an emetic—he likely avoided ar-
rest (and death) when the deputies, in a
preemptive action led by Jean- Lambert
Tallien, denounced Robespierre as a ty-
rant and demanded his immediate exe-
cution. (With four deputies and several
other officials, Robespierre was guillo-
tined the next day.)^10 In the following
year, David was imprisoned twice, be-
tween September and December 1794
in the former Luxembourg Palace, and
from late May to early August 1795 at
the Collège de Quatre- Nations, his old
school.
The third gallery of the Met’s exhi-
bition opens, unforgettably, with six of
the nine known medal-
lion portraits in pen and
ink and wash that David
made during his second
period of incarceration.
These are terse, unsen-
timental, unflinching
portrayals of his fellow
prisoners, ex- Jacobins
whose futures (like his
own) are uncertain. The
first in the sequence,
Portrait of a Revolution-
ary—whose subject is still
unidentified—appears
unfinished. Its some-
what sketchy state is ex-
plained by an annotation
on the back of the frame,
which explains that it
was “drawn by David, in
less than twenty minutes,
[with the sheet placed] on
his knees.”
In the survey that fol-
lows in this room, the last
thirty years of David’s
career are laid out with
admirable, if abbreviated,
comprehensiveness. In
now familiar categories,
we see drawings for two
monumental classical com-
positions, The Interven-
tion of the Sabine Women
(1799) and its companion
Leonidas at Thermopylae, completed
fifteen years later, which attest to Da-
vid’s overarching ambitions as a history
painter working on the grandest scale.
Neither of these multifigured paintings
was a commission. Between December
1799 and May 1805 David showed The
Intervention of the Sabine Women (with
a small number of other works) in a
large room in the Louvre, formerly used
by the Académie d’architecture. This
paying exhibition, for which he charged
an entrance fee of one franc, eighty cen-
times, may have attracted as many as
50,000 visitors.
In the meantime, David had also
ingratiated himself with First Consul
Bonaparte, later Emperor Napoleon.
He was appointed first painter to the
emperor in December 1804 after re-
ceiving a commission for a series of
four enormous canvases commemorat-
ing events surrounding the coronation
of Napoleon and Josephine at the ca-
thedral of Notre- Dame (only two were
completed). While David welcomed
such a return to pageantry and cere-
mony, he was less successful than his
most gifted students in satisfying the
emperor’s demand for action paintingsglorifying the regime’s military victories
in Europe and Egypt. (Fine examples
of such proto- Romantic subjects, alien
to David’s sensibilities, by Anne Louis
Girodet, François Gérard, and Antoine
Jean Gros are on view in the Met’s com-
p a n i o n e x h i b i t i o n o f e i g h t y w o r k s , “ I n t h e
Orbit of Jacques Louis David: Selections
from the Department of Drawings and
Prints.”)David’s late paintings of highly
charged mythological subjects pared
to their essentials, whose protagonists
dominate the picture plane with hier-
atic authority, were long dismissed as
the work of an artist in decline and
have been rehabilitated only recently.^11
It is a style burnished in exile, whose
origins can be dated to the last years
of his imperial service in Paris. David’s
retreat from public life fostered a con-
centration, renewal, and refinement in
his art. He wrote from Brussels in May
1817 to Baron Gros, the most loyal of
his former students: “I am painting as
if I were only thirty years old: I love my
art the way I did when I was sixteen,
and will die, my friend, with a brush in
my hand.”^12
These paintings still depended on
the well- established (and lengthy)
gestation through preliminary studies
and fully resolved preparatory draw-
ings. The knowing, carnal represen-
tation in Cupid and Psyche, on which
David was at work in May 1817, had
been determined four years earlier in
the almost brutal compositional draw-
ing, signed and dated 1813. Like other
such sheets in David’s corpus, on first
sight it might appear to have served as
a modello for approval by a prospec-
tive patron or client. Cupid and Psyche
was indeed a commission, from the
demanding Milanese count Giovanni
Battista Sommariva, a former barber’s
assistant turned lawyer and politician,
who had amassed a fortune in Napo-
leon’s service, had settled in Paris, and
was forming a collection of works by the
most prominent living artists. However,
as was consistently the case in David’s
practice, such elaborate compositional
drawings functioned as a matrix for the
artist himself, enabling him to proceed
to the finished painting without regard
for the approval of the person (or insti-
tution) for whom the work was intended.
The most intriguing section of the
last gallery of the Met’s show brings
together a handful of small sheets
drawn in oily black chalk during the
artist’s exile in Brussels. These are but
a sample of the eighty or so surviving
autonomous drawings of this kind, un-
related to paintings in progress, which
David called “the mad things”—les fo-
lies—“that go through my mind.” Self-
referential and transgressive, haunted
by a primitive vision of Greek culture,
with anguished warriors, veiled ves-
tals, and sorrowing heroes, these are
his “capriccios”—his croquis des ca-
prices—Goyaesque in their strange-
ness, morbidity, and intensity. Despite
the cornucopia of masterworks assem-
bled in this exhibition, one left the final
room regretting that so little of David’s
late work could be displayed, and want-
ing more. QJacques Louis David: Crito, circa 1786 –1787Metropolitan Museum of Art(^9) This figure, un homme du peuple,
has been erroneously identified as a
sansculotte, a member of the group of
Parisian workers who supported the
Republic but had not existed as a po-
litical force in June 1789. See Richard
Wrigley, “Le Serment du Jeu de Paume
de Jacques- Louis David et la représen-
tation de l’homme du peuple en 1791,”
Revue de l’Art, No. 141 (2002).
(^10) See David A. Bell, “The End of the
Ter ror,” The New York Review, March
10, 2022.
(^11) See Philippe Bordes, Jacques- Louis
David: Empire to Exile (J. Paul Getty
Museum/Clark Art Institute, 2005).
(^12) Bordes, Jacques- Louis David, p. 237.
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