Artwork of the Day - 24 November 2004

[Mephisto2]

Jacques-Louis David
Death of Marat
Oil on canvas.
1793 Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Brussels, Belgium.



David is one of my favourite artists and a perfect example of the neo-classicist painter. David's painting of his friend Marat is one of the most famous to come out of the French Revolution. He had visited Marat the day before his assassination and remembered the room vividly.

Marat is dying: his eyelids droop, his head weighs heavily on his shoulder, his right arm slides to the ground. His body, as painted by David, is that of a healthy man, still young. The scene inevitably calls to mind a rendering of the "Descent from the Cross." The face is marked by suffering, but is also gentle and suffused by a growing peacefulness as the pangs of death loosen their grip. David has surrounded Marat with a number of details borrowed from his subject's world, including the knife and Charlotte Corday's petition, attempting to suggest through these objects both the victim's simplicity and grandeur, and the perfidy of the assassin. The petition ("My great unhappiness gives me a right to your kindness"), the assignat Marat was preparing for some poor unfortunate ("you will give this assignat to that mother of five children whose husband died in the defense of his country"), the makeshift writing-table and the mended sheet are the means by which David discreetly bears witness to his admiration and indignation.

Commentary care of Boston College - Read more at http://www.bc.edu/bc_org/avp/cas/his...dav_marat.html

Marat was a firebrand and editor of L'Ami du Peuple (The Friend of the People). A colleague and friend of Robespierre, he encouraged violence and was instrumental in the Great Terror. His assassin, Charlotte Corday, was a Royalist and a supporter of a rival faction. Gaining access to Marat by the use of a false letter of introduction (shown in Marat's hand) she stabbed him in the heart as he lay in his bath; treatment and a salve for a terrible skin disease from which Marat suffered.

Corday was immediately apprehended and later executed. He composure and beauty during the trial were renowned. Before her death, she wrote to her father apologizing for "having disposed of my existence without your permission." During her trial she lamented "there are so few patriots who know how to die for their country; everything is egoism; what a sorry people to found a Republic."

I love this painting.

For those of you interested in the French Revolution (and how could you be otherwise?!), then I highly recommend Simon Schama's majesterial, if slightly revisionist, history Citizens.


Mr Mephisto