Jacques-Louis David was a relatively mature thirty-six when he achieved his first incontestable success with the exhibition of his work
The Oath of the Horatii(Paris, Musée du Louvre) in Paris in 1785. For the previous twenty years or so, artists had been attempting to inject an ethical and moral dimension into painting but it took David’s stunning canvas to consolidate these efforts and to define what later came to be called Neoclassicism. Having developed a new artistic vocabulary, David quickly built upon his burgeoning esteem with the exhibition of
The Death of Socrates(New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art) in 1787. This work was praised in the English periodical
The World(2 October 1787) as
the most exquisite and admirable effort of art which has appeared since the Capella
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Citation: Lilley, Edward David. "Jacques-Louis David". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 16 September 2006 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=1150, accessed 25 November 2024.]
