The radical revolutionary journalist Jean-Paul Marat lies murdered in his bath, still holding his quill and his killer's letter. David painted the picture within months of the death, turning a political assassination into a solemn icon of the Revolution.
Key facts
- Artist
- Jacques-Louis David1748–1825 · French
- Date
- 1793
- Period
- Neoclassicism1760–1830
- Medium
- Oil on canvas
- Dimensions
- 165 × 128 cm
- Location
- Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium Brussels, Belgium
Actual size
Compared with an adult 170 cm tall
Palette
#5B4D32#3E3625#27221A#866433#AF8D51Background
Marat was a radical Jacobin journalist whose newspaper L'Ami du peuple called for purging the Revolution's enemies. He suffered from a severe skin disease and spent long hours in a medicinal bath, working on a board laid across the tub.
On 13 July 1793 Charlotte Corday, a young woman sympathetic to the moderate Girondins, gained entry by promising information on traitors and stabbed him to death with a kitchen knife. She was guillotined four days later.
David was Marat's friend and had visited him the day before. The National Convention asked him to commemorate Marat; he finished the painting in just over three months, and it was displayed in the assembly hall as part of revolutionary propaganda.
Technique & composition
The upper half of the canvas is an empty dark wall, taking up half the picture. This void creates a sense of weight and silence and makes the brightly lit figure of stand out all the more.
David deliberately idealised Marat: in life his skin was ravaged by disease, but here it is smooth as marble; the bathroom is reduced to a tub, a crate and some cloth. is a small, neat cut, with almost no gore.
The composition is spare and solemn, the horizontal bath and vertical forming a stable structure. The crate bears the words “À Marat, David”, like a tombstone.
Details
Symbolism
A revolutionary Pietà
Marat's hanging right arm recalls Christ's arm in Michelangelo's Pietà or Caravaggio's Entombment. David borrowed the imagery of Christian martyrdom to present Marat as a revolutionary saint who died for the people.
Two letters
In his left hand Marat holds , which reads: “It is enough that I am very unhappy to have a right to your benevolence.” On the crate lies another note with a banknote, which Marat was sending to the widow of a soldier. The contrast highlights the killer's deceit and the victim's kindness.
Knife and pen
on the floor faces in Marat's hand: violence on one side, words and ideas on the other.
Stories
- Did you know?
After Robespierre's fall Marat's reputation collapsed and the painting was returned to David. After his exile to Brussels it stayed with his family, who gave it to the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium in 1893.
- Did you know?
The base of the crate is inscribed “L'An Deux” (Year Two) in the new Revolutionary calendar, corresponding to 1793–94.
- Did you know?
In the nineteenth century Baudelaire praised it as full of tenderness and sorrow, David's greatest work.
Legacy
The Death of Marat is considered one of the first modern political images, transforming a real event into propaganda with religious force. Twentieth-century political posters and even news photography have continued this way of heroising the dead.
It has also inspired countless artistic responses; Picasso, Munch and contemporary photographers have all restaged Marat in his bath.
