Jacques-Louis David was a French painter in the Neoclassical style, considered to be the preeminent painter of the era. In the 1780s, his cerebral brand of history painting marked a change in taste away from Rococo frivolity toward classical austerity and severity and heightened feeling, harmonizing with the moral climate of the final years of the Ancien Régime.
Jeanne Françoise Julie Adélaïde Récamier, known as Juliette, was a French socialite whose salon drew people from the leading literary and political circles of early 19th-century Paris. An icon of neoclassicism, Récamier cultivated a public persona as a great beauty, and her fame quickly spread across Europe. She befriended many intellectuals, sat for the finest artists of the age, and spurned an offer of marriage from Prince Augustus of Prussia.
Jean-Honoré Fragonard was a French painter and printmaker whose late Rococo manner was distinguished by remarkable facility, exuberance, and hedonism. One of the most prolific artists active in the last decades of the Ancien Régime, Fragonard produced more than 550 paintings, of which only five are dated. Among his most popular works are genre paintings conveying an atmosphere of intimacy and veiled eroticism.
L'Amour et Psyché, enfants is an oil painting by William Adolphe Bouguereau in 1890. It is currently in a private collection. It was displayed in the Salon of Paris in 1890, the year Bouguereau was President of the Société des Artistes Français. The painting features Greek mythological figures Eros and Psyché, sharing an embrace and kiss. Bouguereau was a classical-style painter in the Neoclassical era of art. The painting is characterized by the frothy background the figures delicately stand on. It depicts the beginning of the forbidden romance of Cupid and Psyche, a popular subject at the time of execution.
Cupid and Psyche is a story originally from Metamorphoses, written in the 2nd century AD by Lucius Apuleius Madaurensis. The tale concerns the overcoming of obstacles to the love between Psyche and Cupid or Amor, and their ultimate union in a sacred marriage. Although the only extended narrative from antiquity is that of Apuleius from 2nd century AD, Eros and Psyche appear in Greek art as early as the 4th century BC. The story's Neoplatonic elements and allusions to mystery religions accommodate multiple interpretations, and it has been analyzed as an allegory and in light of folktale, Märchen or fairy tale, and myth.
The Death of Marat is a 1793 painting by Jacques-Louis David depicting the artist's friend and murdered French revolutionary leader, Jean-Paul Marat. One of the most famous images from the era of the French Revolution, David painted it when he was the leading French Neoclassical painter, a Montagnard, and a member of the revolutionary Committee of General Security. Created in the months after Marat's death, the painting shows Marat lying dead in his bath after his murder by Charlotte Corday on 13 July 1793. Art historian T. J. Clark called David's painting the first modernist work for "the way it took the stuff of politics as its material, and did not transmute it".
François-Édouard Picot was a French painter during the July Monarchy, painting mythological, religious and historical subjects.
Mars Being Disarmed by Venus is the last painting produced by the French artist Jacques-Louis David. He began it in 1822 during his exile in Brussels and completed it three years later, before dying in an accident in 1825. The work combines idealization with elements of realism. Specifically, David integrated the idealized forms of mythological painting with a realist attention to detail. This combination of two seemingly incompatible principles also plays an important role in the themes of the painting, most notably in its treatment of masculinity and femininity.
André Antoine Bernard called Bernard de Saintes, was a French lawyer and revolutionary, one of the Jacobins responsible for the Reign of Terror in the French Revolution.
The Death of Socrates is an oil on canvas painted by French painter Jacques-Louis David in 1787. The painting was part of the neoclassical style, popular in the 1780s, that depicted subjects from the Classical age, in this case the story of the execution of Socrates as told by Plato in his Phaedo. In this story, Socrates has been convicted of corrupting the youth of Athens and introducing strange gods, and has been sentenced to die by drinking poison hemlock. Socrates uses his death as a final lesson for his pupils rather than fleeing when the opportunity arises, and faces it calmly. The Phaedo depicts the death of Socrates and is also Plato's fourth and last dialogue to detail the philosopher's final days, which is also detailed in Euthyphro, Apology, and Crito.
The Intervention of the Sabine Women is a 1799 painting by the French painter Jacques-Louis David, showing a legendary episode following the abduction of the Sabine women by the founding generation of Rome.
Portrait of Madame Récamier is an 1800 portrait of the Parisian socialite Juliette Récamier by Jacques-Louis David showing her in the height of Neoclassical fashion, reclining on a Directoire style sofa in a simple Empire line dress with almost bare arms, and short hair "à la Titus." The work is unfinished.
Ewa Lajer-Burcharth is a Polish art historian and William Dorr Boardman Professor of Fine Arts in the History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University and Senior Adviser to the humanities program at the Radcliffe Institute. Her specialties include 18th-century French and contemporary art.
Henriette de Verninac (1780–1827) was the daughter of Charles-François Delacroix, minister of Foreign Affairs under the Directory, and wife of the diplomat Raymond de Verninac Saint-Maur. She is known as the subject of a portrait by Jacques-Louis David.
Love and Psyche or Cupid and Psyche is an 1817 painting by Jacques-Louis David, now in the Cleveland Museum of Art. It shows Cupid and Psyche. It was produced during David's exile in Brussels, for the patron and collector Gian Battista Sommariva. On its first exhibition at the museum in Brussels, it surprised viewers with its realist treatment of the figure of Cupid. Critics generally saw the painting's unconventional style and realistic depiction of Cupid as proof of David's decline while in exile, but art historians have come to see the work as a deliberate departure from traditional methods of representing mythological figures.
Marguerite-Charlotte David (1764–1826) was the French wife of the painter Jacques-Louis David.
A Hare and a Leg of Lamb is a 1742 painting by French Rococo painter and engraver Jean-Baptiste Oudry.
Cupid Crowned by Psyche or Psyche Crowning Cupid is a 1785-1790 oil on canvas painting by Jean-Baptiste Greuze, now in the Palais des Beaux-Arts de Lille. It shows a scene from the myth of Cupid and Psyche, with a figure of Modesty standing behind Psyche and two cupids in the background placing rose crowns on a bed and throwing incense on a tripod.
Psyche Showing Her Sisters Her Gifts from Cupid is an oil painting by the French artist Jean-Honoré Fragonard, painted in 1753, in the National Gallery in London. Its dimensions are 168.3 by 192.4 cm.
Adélaïde Victoire Noyel, Comtesse de Bellegarde, known as Adèle de Bellegarde, was a Savoyard aristocrat. During the French Revolution, she became a popular salon hostess in Paris, and modelled for Jacques-Louis David's 1799 painting The Intervention of the Sabine Women.
