Porträt des Jacques-François Desmaisons

When David was nine, his father was killed in a pistol duel, and two architect uncles stepped in to raise him. One of them was Jacques-Francois Desmaisons, and here he sits at his worktable with a compass, a ruler, rolled drawings, and a book open to the name of Palladio, the great Renaissance architect. The uncles wanted the boy to follow them into building. He wanted to paint, and won that argument. By 1782, when he made this warm, close portrait, David was back from years of study in Rome and starting to be talked about in Paris. Within a few years he would paint the Oath of the Horatii and become the defining artist first of the Revolution and then of Napoleon. He gave the uncle who raised him a plain, generous likeness, surrounded by the profession David himself had turned down.