02 Paintings, Death of Marat by Jacques-Louis David and Julie Roberts , with footnotes

Jacques-Louis David  (1748–1825

Death of Marat, c. 1793

Oil on canvas

height: 165 cm (64.9 in); width: 128 cm (50.3 in)

Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium

The Death of Marat (La Mort de Marat or Marat Assassiné) 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 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".

The painting is in the collection of the Royal Museum of Fine Arts of Belgium. A replica, created by the artist's studio, is on display at the Louvre

Jacques-Louis David (30 August 1748 – 29 December 1825) was an influential 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 a classical austerity and severity, heightened feeling harmonizing with the moral climate of the final years of the Ancien Régime.

David later became an active supporter of the French Revolution and friend of Maximilien Robespierre (1758–1794), and was effectively a dictator of the arts under the French Republic. Imprisoned after Robespierre's fall from power, he aligned himself with yet another political regime upon his release: that of Napoleon, The First Consul of France. At this time he developed his Empire style, notable for its use of warm Venetian colours. After Napoleon's fall from Imperial power and the Bourbon revival, David exiled himself to Brussels, then in the United Kingdom of the Netherlands, where he remained until his death. David had a large number of pupils, making him the strongest influence in French art of the early 19th century, especially academic Salon painting. More on Jacques-Louis David

Julie Roberts, b. 1963

The Death of Marat, after David, c. 1999

Oil on canvas

20 by 20 in., 50.8 by 50.8 cm.

Private collection

Estimate at 2,000 - 3,000 USD in June 2023

When he was murdered, Marat was correcting a proof of his newspaper L'Ami du peuple. The blood stained page is preserved. In the painting, the note Marat is holding is not an actual quotation of Corday, but a fictional expression based on what Corday might have said. More on The Death of Marat

In her unsettling paintings, prints, and drawings, Julie Roberts mines her own difficult childhood to portray what she calls the “disruption” lurking beneath the placid façade of bucolic landscapes and domestic scenes. Grounded in her extensive research into the modern history of the U.K., and influenced by a range of artists, from Barbara Kruger to Jenny Holzer, Roberts’s work is dense with detail and references. In her earlier paintings, she isolated shrunken objects, including pieces of hospital furniture, and dollhouse-like domestic spaces and landscapes, against monochromatic backgrounds, causing them to appear disquieting and pregnant with secrets. Eventually, as she describes, she “slowly started creeping toward the edge of the canvas,” filling every inch with women, children, and homey spaces rendered with a deadpan formality that both conceals and suggests the turbulence they contain within. More on Julie Roberts

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