Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 6.djvu/879

Rh enthusiasm that made all the intellect of France believe in a new era of equality and emancipation from all the ills of life. Sent to the Convention in September 1792, by the Section du Musde, he quickly distinguished himself by the defence of two French artists in Rome who had fallen into the merciless hands of the sbirri of the Inquisition ; and as the behaviour of the authorities of the French Academy in Rome had been in obedience to old slavish ideas, he had the influence to get it suppressed. In January follow ing his election into the Convention his vote was given for the king s death. Thus the man who was so greatly indebted to the Roman Academy and to Louis XVI. assisted resolutely in the destruction of both. This line of action was no doubt a kind of self-sacrifice to him ; it was in obedience to a principle, like the dreadful act of Brutus condemning his sons, a subject he painted with all his powers. Cato and Stoicism were the order of the day. Hitherto the actor had walked the stage in modern dress. Brutus had been applauded in red-heeled shoes and culottes jarretees ; but Talma, advised by David, appeared in the toga and sa*ndals before an enthusiastic audience. At this period of his life Mdlle. de Noailles thought to make a good impression upon him by insisting on his painting a sacred subject, with Jesus Christ as the hero. When the picture was done, the Saviour was found to be another Cato. &quot; I told you so,&quot; he replied to the expostulations of the lady, &quot;there is no in spiration in Christianity now ! &quot; He accordingly developed the scheme of the Fete d, VEtre Supreme, and he remained the master of pageants for a long period, escaping the guillotine only by the regard paid to his character as an artist. When Napoleon destroyed the new-found liberty, and ex punged the novel gospel, David succumbed to the military spirit and well-nigh worshipped him. His picture of Napoleon on horseback pointing the way to Italy is now in Berlin We have mentioned the principal classic subjects painted by David. They are hard and dry in execution, painted on a white ground with opaque but splendid colour, which has, however, really little charm. The other class of works which came from his easel was commemorative of the Re volution. When Lepelletier was assassinated in the Palais Royal, after the vote for the death of the king, David painted the subject, and the picture was exhibited in the Convention with much emotion. Marat Dead in the Bath id a work of a very impressive kind. The Oath in the Tennis Court is another very important production, both historically and in relation to the artist. His exten sive commissions from the emperor are still objects of attraction at Versailles. On the return of the Bourbons our painter was exiled with che other remaining regicides, and retired to Brussels, where he recommenced his classic series by the Loves of Paris and Helen. Here he remained till his death, 29th December 1825, at the age of seventy- seven, having rejected the offer made through Baron Hum- boldt of the office of minister of fine arts at Berlin. His end was true to his whole career and to his nationality. While dying, a print of the Leonidas, one of his favourite subjects, was submitted to him. It was placed conveni ently, and after vaguely looking at it a long time, &quot;II n y a que moi qui pouvais concevoir la tete de Leonidas,&quot; he whispered, and died. His friends and his party thought to carry the body back to his beloved Paris for burial, but the Government of the day arrested the procession at the frontier, an act which caused some scandal, and furnished the occasion of a terrible song of Beranger s. Gros, Girodet, and Gerard were David s best pupils.  DAVID, (1789-1856), usually called David d Angers, a much-admired French sculptor, and, like David the painter, to whom he was in no other way related. a demonstrative partisan of advanced ideas in politics and religion, was born at Angers, 12th March 1789. His father was a sculptor, or rather a carver, but he had thrown aside the mallet and taken the musket, fighting against the Chouans of L;i Vendde. He returned to his trade at the end of the civil war, to find his customers gone, so that young David was born into poverty. As the boy grew up his father wished to force him into some more lucrative and certain way of life. At last he succeeded in surmount ing the opposition to his becoming a sculptor, and in his eighteenth year left for Paris to study the art upon a fund of eleven francs. As far as we know his works, the genius on which he relied was not very great ; but after struggling against want for a year and a half, he succeeded in taking the prize at the Ecole des Beaux Arts. Energy and perse verance stood in the place of natural ability, and now fortune aided him in the shape of an annuity of 600 francs (.24), granted by the municipality of his native town, by the name of which he was proud to be called ever after. This was in 1809, and in 1811 his Epaminondas gained the prize of Rome, where he spent five years, rather too much impressed by the works of Canova. Returning from Rome about the time of the restoration of the Bourbons, he would not remain in the neighbourhood of the Tuileries, swarming with foreign conquerors and re turned royalists ; he found his way to London, having made several English acquaintances in Rome. Here, if we are to believe the statement in his biography, he was offered the commission to erect a monument commemorative of Water loo, more probably he received an invitation to offer a design for some such work, which he might misunderstand from his ignorance of English. At the same time his resources were exhausted; and Flaxman and others visited upon him the sins of David the painter, to whom he was supposed to be related. With great difficulty he made his way to Paris again, where a comparatively prosperous career opened upon him. His medallions and busts were in much request, and monumental works also came to him. One of the best of these was that of Gutenberg at Strasburg ; but those he himself valued most were the statue of Barra, a drummer boy who fell in the war in La Vendee, who con tinued to beat his drum till the moment of death, and the monument to the Greek liberator Bozzaris. This was a young female figure he called &quot;Reviving Greece,&quot; of which his friend Victor Hugo says rather absurdly, &quot; It is difficult to see anything more beautiful in the world ; this statue joins the grandeur of Phidias to the expressive manner of Puget.&quot; His busts and medallions were very numerous, and among his sitters may be found not only the illustrious men and women of France, but many others both of England and Germany countries which he visited pro fessionally in 1827 and 1829, His medallions, it is affirmed, number 500. He died on the 4th of January 1856. David d Angers was respected for his consistency and benevolence. As an example of the latter may ^ be mentioned his rushing off to the sickbed of Rouget de Lille, the author of the Marseillaise Hymn, modelling and carv ing him in marble without delay, making a lottery of the work, and possibly saving the poet s life by sending him the proceeds, 72, when in the extremity of need.  DAVID HA-COHEN, a learned Rabbin, was born at Lara, in Spain, about the beginning of the 17th century, and died at Hamburg in 1674. He was chief of the synagogue at Amsterdam, and he afterwards held the same office at Hamburg. From this he was deposed on a suspicion of an intention to become a Christian, which seems to have been unfounded. It probably originated in the fact that he held more liberal sentiments than those which prevailed in the Jewish community of his time. Tavid was the author of several works of value in the 