Le Philosophe

In 1779 David was a young French student in Rome, still years away from the huge history paintings that would make him the Revolution's official artist. He was steeping himself in antiquity and in the old Italian masters, and this study of a bearded old man holding a book comes straight out of that apprenticeship. It is the kind of character head painters made to practise flesh, beard and the fall of light on a single figure. He brought it back to Paris and showed it at the Salon of 1781, one of the works that introduced him to the public. The raised hand and the upward gaze give the anonymous model the air of a thinker out of the ancient world David was busy studying.