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David was the great painter of the French Revolution, and he was also a working part of it. Elected to the National Convention, the new republic's assembly, he sat with the radical Montagnards, served on a committee that sent people to the guillotine, and voted for the death of King Louis XVI.

In July 1793 the journalist Jean-Paul Marat, a friend and political ally, was stabbed in his bath by Charlotte Corday, a young woman from the opposing faction. David painted him within months, dead and slumped over the tub in a plain dark room, the murder weapon and a bloodstained letter almost the only things in the frame. He cleared away the columns and allegory that history painting usually carried and gave the Revolution a martyr posed like a dead Christ.

When the Terror collapsed David was jailed, then rose again as the official painter of Napoleon, staging the emperor's coronation across an enormous canvas. After Napoleon's final defeat in 1815 David went into exile in Brussels, and he never returned to France, dying there in 1825.