Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès (1748-1836)

David signed this in Brussels in 1817, and both the man who painted it and the man in the chair were exiles there. Jacques-Louis David had been the great painter first of the French Revolution and then of Napoleon. When the Bourbons came back to the throne they drove him out, because years earlier he had voted to execute their king. Sitting for him is Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyes, in Brussels for the very same reason. It was Sieyes, a priest turned political thinker, whose pamphlet asking what the Third Estate really was had helped set the whole Revolution going in 1789, and who later helped hand power to Napoleon. Asked how he had come through the Terror when so many around him were guillotined, he is said to have answered simply, I lived. Here the two old revolutionaries, both near 70, sit together in a city that had taken them in. David never saw France again. He died in Brussels eight years later, in 1825.