The Intervention of the Sabine Women

David planned this painting in prison. He had voted for the execution of the king and sided with Robespierre, and when Robespierre fell in 1794 David was arrested and held in the Luxembourg Palace. His estranged wife, a royalist who had left him over politics, came to visit him there, and out of that he took an old Roman legend about ending a war. The Sabine women, carried off years earlier by the Romans, throw themselves and their babies between their Roman husbands and their Sabine fathers to stop the killing. Hersilia stands at the centre in white, arms flung wide. David finished it in 1799, while France was still raw from the Terror, and meant it plainly as a plea to stop the bloodshed and reunite. He exhibited it himself for paying visitors rather than at the official Salon. It hangs in the Louvre, a few rooms from the huge coronation of Napoleon he would paint a few years later.