Tag Archives: Jacques-Louis David

Marat Assassinated {The Story of Art}

Marat Assassinated. Jacques Louis David. 1793.

“We have reached the really modern times which dawned when the French Revolution of 1789 put an end to may assumptions that had been taken for granted for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. Just as the Great Revolution has its roots in the Age of Reason, so have the changes in man’s ideas about art… In the past, the subject-matter of paintings had been very much taken for granted… All this changed very rapidly during the period of the French Revolution. Suddenly artists felt free to choose their subjects anything… that appealed to the imagination and aroused interest… The French revolutionaries loved to think of themselves as Greeks and Romans reborn, and their painting, no less than their architecture, reflected this taste for what was called Roman grandeur. The leading artist of this neo-classical style was the painter Jacques Louis David, who was the ‘official artist’ of the Revolutionary Government… These people felt they were living in historic times, and that the events of their own years were just as worthy of the painter’s attention as the episodes of Greek and Roman history.When one of the leaders of the French Revolution, Marat, was killed in his bath by a fanatical young woman, David painted him as a martyr who had died for his cause… He had learned from the study of Greek and Roman sculpture how to model the muscles and sinews of the body, and give it the appearance of noble beauty; he had also learned from classical art to leave out all details which are not essential to the main effect, and to aim at simplicity.”

Ernst H. Gombrich, “Chapter 23: The Break in Tradition,” The Story of Art, 15th edition

To My Mother

Portrait of Madame Charles Pierre Pecoul nee Potain, Mother in Law of the Artist. Jacques-Louis David. 1784.

 

To My Mother

Edgar Allen Poe, 1849

 

Because I feel that, in the Heavens above,

The angels, whispering to one another,

Can find, among their burning terms of love,

None so devotional as that of “Mother,”

Therefore by that dear name I long have called you—

You who are more than mother unto me,

And fill my heart of hearts, where death installed you,

In setting my Virginia’s spirit free,

My mother—my own mother, who dies early,

Was but the mother of myself; but you

Are mother to the one I loved so dearly,

And thus are dearer than the mother I knew

By that infinity with which my wife

Was dearer to my soul than it soul-life.

 

This beautiful poem is addressed by Poe to his mother-in-law, the mother of his young wife Virginia Clemm. Virginia died of consumption at the age of twenty-four.