As part of the sale organised by PIASA auction house, on Thursday, June, 4th 2020 and dedicated to old drawings and paintings, historical souvenirs, furniture and art objects, a drawing by Jacques Louis David will be offered for sale.
After training in rhetoric at the Collège des Quatre-Nations and a stint in the studio of the neoclassical painter Joseph-Marie Vien, Jacques-Louis David entered the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture.
His first compositions, mainly mythological, betray the influence of Rococo aesthetics. His first participations in the Salon ended in failure. The artist will remember this when, in 1793, he passed the decree for the suppression of the academies. In 1774, Jacques-Louis David won first prize in Rome, which allowed him to stay for four years at the Mancini Palace, then the residence of the Académie de France in the Eternal City. During the summer of 1779, taking advantage of a stay in Naples, the painter travelled to Herculaneum and Pompeii. This visit will orient his style towards Classicism.
After his return to Paris, David opened his own studio. There he received pupils such as Anne-Louis Girodet, Jean-Germain Drouais and Jean-Baptiste Debret. In 1783, the presentation of the painting Le Serment des Horaces (The Oath of the Horatii) met with great success. It was a testimony to the new painting. Witnessing the revolution of 1789, the painter, in parallel with his artistic career, began a political career and became a member of the Convention. In addition to speeches that became famous, he organised major revolutionary parties.
David's technique is visible through the unfinished sketches he left. They make it possible to observe his way of painting and to know the process of its realization. His graphic work is colossal. There are more than a thousand drawings grouped in twelve "Roman albums", plus fourteen notebooks constituting 680 folios and 468 isolated drawings made at various periods, including 130 drawings during his exile in Brussels.
Jacques Louis DAVID (Paris 1748 - Bruxelles 1825)
A man and a woman
Black chalk, signed with the monogram on the left
4 x 4,4 in
Estimation : 4000 / 6000 euros
The black pencil drawing offered for sale on Thursday 4 June 2020 is reproduced in the catalogue raisonné of Pierre Rosenberg and Louis Antoine Prat. Monogrammed in the lower right-hand corner, it is about ten hundredths of a centimetre high. Its estimate is between 4,000 and 6,000 euros. It is easy to distinguish a woman embracing a man. Vestiges of the preparation of a composition, the few strokes of pencil skillfully suggest anatomy. After the period of the Directory, David became a great admirer of Napoleon Bonaparte, for whom he collaborated actively until the fall of the Empire in 1815.
