David, Study for The Lictors Bringing Brutus the Bodies of his Sons

Met curator Perrin Stein on subjectivity in Jacques-Louis David’s Study for The Lictors Bringing Brutus the Bodies of his Sons, 1787.

This sheet is a compositional study for The Lictors Bringing Brutus the Bodies of his Sons (Musée du Louvre, Paris), painted by David on the eve of the French Revolution and exhibited shortly after the Fall of the Bastille. As with many of his iconic Neoclassical canvases, the subject was drawn from Roman history but found great resonance in the context of contemporary events. The canvas depicts an episode from the life of Lucius Junius Brutus, who put to an end the brutal régime of Tarquin, Rome’s last king, and established the first Roman Empire, only to later find his two sons embroiled in a royalist conspiracy. True to his political convictions, Brutus condemned his sons to death. The novelty of David’s painting is its focus, not on the executions, but on the wrenching domestic aftermath. David’s Neoclassical style is fully formed here and can be seen in the clean geometry of the architectural setting, the arrangement of the figures in a relief-like plane, the linear treatment of the forms, and the cool monochrome palette. The poses of the main figures, from the brooding Brutus cast in shadow at the left, to his anguished wife and daughters to the right, as well as the furniture and accessories, are all based on antiquities copied by the artist while he was a student in Rome.

View this work on metmuseum.org. 

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