Érasistrate découvrant la cause de la maladie d'Antiochus

David had failed the Prix de Rome three times and was so crushed by the third rejection that he reportedly tried to starve himself. In 1774, on his fourth attempt, he won it with this picture, and the prize sent him to Rome where his whole style would change. The story comes from Plutarch: the Greek physician Erasistratus works out that the young prince Antiochus is not sick with any disease but wasting away from love, love for Stratonice, his own father's new wife. The doctor reads it in the boy's pulse, which races when she enters the room. David stages it like a piece of theatre, the pale prince collapsed on his bed, the woman standing apart. The brushwork is still soft and decorative, closer to his teachers than to the hard, austere history paintings he would later become famous for. It stayed at the school where he trained, the Beaux-Arts in Paris, and hangs there now.