Académie d'homme, Hector

This is a student exercise, painted in Rome in 1778 by a young Jacques-Louis David still years from fame. Newcomers at the French Academy in Rome were required to send home these academies, careful studies of a single posed male nude. David took his cue from an ancient statue he could see in the city, the Dying Gaul on the Capitoline, and turned the figure to show it almost entirely from behind. By his own account the pose caused a stir among the other students in the house. He never sold it. He kept the canvas in his studio for the rest of his life as a model for his own pupils, one of whom, Francois-Xavier Fabre, founded the Montpellier museum where it hangs today.