自画像

In the summer of 1794 the Terror ate its own. Robespierre went to the guillotine in July, and Jacques-Louis David, who had voted for the king's death and served the revolutionary government, was arrested and locked in a former customs house. He was 45 and half expected to follow his friends to the scaffold. In his cell he painted himself with palette and brushes in hand, his collar loose and his gaze turned sharply toward the mirror. Turning that mirror on himself was partly a defense: better to be remembered as a painter than as a politician of the fallen regime. He survived, was released the next year, and within a decade was painting Napoleon.