Works by Jacques-Louis David

Jacques-Louis David idealised the bodies in his history paintings after Greek and Roman ideals of beauty, but painted portrait sitters as they were, with hands and fabric in close detail against bare backgrounds.

François Boucher sent the young David on to Joseph-Marie Vien, and he failed at the Prix de Rome three times before winning it in 1774. In one of the failed entries, Apollo and Diana Attacking the Children of Niobe, the two gods shoot from a cloudy sky onto a heap of bodies in pink and blue drapery; the austere history painting that changed taste came in the 1780s.

He chose the Roman story of Brutus for a commission from Louis XVI, and almost certainly did not mean it as the republican statement the Salon of 1789 took it for. In the 1787 study, The Lictors Bringing Brutus the Bodies of His Sons, Brutus broods in shadow under a statue of Roma while his wife and daughters raise their arms in grief. He voted for the king's death, was jailed twice after Robespierre fell, and became Napoleon's court painter: in The Emperor Napoleon in His Study at the Tuileries the clock reads past four and a candle has burned low.

Madame David, painted in 1813, shows his usual way with a portrait: an empty dark ground, a face left unidealised, and satin, a red shawl and folded hands set down with care. Pardoned by Louis XVIII, he still chose exile in Brussels, where in Cupid and Psyche the god is a gangly boy grinning out at us while Psyche sleeps. Drawings make up about half of what follows.

Sources: Wikipedia, National Gallery of Art, Dallas Museum of Art, J. Paul Getty Museum, Cleveland Museum of Art.