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, severity, and heightened feeling, which harmonized with the moral climate of the final years of the Ancien Régime.
Sappho was an Archaic Greek poet from Eresos or Mytilene on the island of Lesbos. Sappho is known for her lyric poetry, written to be sung while accompanied by music. In ancient times, Sappho was widely regarded as one of the greatest lyric poets and was given names such as the "Tenth Muse" and "The Poetess". Most of Sappho's poetry is now lost, and what is extant has mostly survived in fragmentary form; only the Ode to Aphrodite is certainly complete. As well as lyric poetry, ancient commentators claimed that Sappho wrote elegiac and iambic poetry. Three epigrams formerly attributed to Sappho are extant, but these are actually Hellenistic imitations of Sappho's style.
François Boucher was a French painter, draughtsman and etcher, who worked in the Rococo style. Boucher is known for his idyllic and voluptuous paintings on classical themes, decorative allegories, and pastoral scenes. He was perhaps the most celebrated painter and decorative artist of the 18th century.
Events in the year 1809 in Art.
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, it was painted when David 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 assassination 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".
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.
Sapho and Phao is an Elizabethan era stage play, a comedy written by John Lyly. One of Lyly's earliest dramas, it was likely the first that the playwright devoted to the allegorical idealisation of Queen Elizabeth I that became the predominating feature of Lyly's dramatic canon.
Sapho is an opera in three acts by Charles Gounod, premiered 16 April 1851 at Salle Le Peletier of the Paris Opera. The libretto was by Émile Augier after the life of the poet Sappho of Lesbos. The creation of the work was given an impetus by, and provided a central role for, the mezzo-soprano Pauline Viardot.
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.
The Portrait of Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier and his Wife is a double portrait of the French chemist Antoine Lavoisier and his wife and collaborator Marie-Anne Pierrette Paulze, commissioned from the French painter Jacques-Louis David in 1788 by Marie-Anne. It is now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
Prince Nikolai Borisovich Yusupov was a Russian nobleman and art collector of the House of Yusupov.
Saint Roch Interceding with the Virgin for the Plague-Stricken is an early religious painting by the French artist Jacques-Louis David. It shows Saint Roch interceding to the Virgin Mary and Christ Child for the plague sufferers shown around him. He painted it in 1780 during his stay at the Villa Medici in Rome after winning first prize for painting in the Prix de Rome and exhibited it at the 1781 Paris Salon on his return to France. While in Rome he was much influenced by the works of Caravaggio, Poussin, Guercino and Lebrun. He was determined not to be seduced by the Italian baroque style, declaring "the Antique will not seduce me, it lacks animation, it does not move". Nevertheless, he filled twelve sketchbooks with drawings while he was in Rome, and he and his studio used them as models for the rest of his life.
The Farewell of Telemachus and Eucharis is a painting from 1818 by Jacques-Louis David, now in the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, California. Painted during David's exile in Brussels, it was purchased by the Count von Schönborn-Wiesentheid. It depicts Telemachus and Eucharis, two characters in François Fénelon's 1699 novel Les Aventures de Télémaque, inspired by Homer's Odyssey. The artist's last painting of a couple from mythology, it is a pendant painting to his Love and Psyche.
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.
The Loves of Paris and Helen is a 1788 oil-on-canvas painting by the French Neoclassical artist Jacques-Louis David, showing Helen of Troy and Paris from Homer's Iliad. It is now in the Louvre Museum.
Psyche Abandoned is a c. 1795 painting by Jacques-Louis David, now in a private collection. It shows Psyche as a crouching female nude in profile against a blue sky with a hill in the background. She stares at the viewer with an expression of loss, pain, and betrayal. Thought to have been painted during David's imprisonment during the French Revolution, it dates from either 1794 or 1795. Vertical in format, it diverges from the academic conventions for representing the female nude.
Cupid complaining to Venus is an oil painting by Lucas Cranach the Elder. Nearly 20 similar works by Cranach and his workshop are known, from the earliest dated version in Güstrow Palace of 1527 to one in the Burrell Collection, Glasgow, dated to 1545, with the figures in a variety of poses and differing in other details. The Metropolitan Museum of Art notes that the number of extant versions suggests that this was one of Cranach's most successful compositions.
Sappho at Leucate, also known as The Death of Sappho, is an oil-on-canvas painting executed by the French painter Antoine-Jean Gros in 1801. It has the dimensions of 122 by 100 cm. It is held in the Musée d'Art et d'Histoire Baron-Gérard, in Bayeux.
