View of the Luxembourg Gardens

By the autumn of 1794 the Revolution had begun to eat its own. Robespierre had gone to the guillotine in July, and Jacques-Louis David, the painter who had staged the Revolution's grand festivals and voted for the king's death, was under arrest, held in a room in the Luxembourg palace. From its window he painted this, the only pure landscape of his career. You can still make out the wooden fence that closed off the prisoners' exercise yard, and past it the raked walks of the garden, empty of people. He worked it with the same cool geometry he brought to his history paintings, the ordered world holding steady while his own was collapsing. Released a few months later, he was jailed again, and painted the view once more from memory in another cell.