Thinking on Paper

ACQUES LOUIS David’s greatest paintings——have an almost marmoreal quality. Suspended forever in their Neoclassical attitudes, the figures in David’s canvases are not only sculptural but inevitable, as if they had always existed. However, they were actually the outcome of a painstaking creative process that in some cases lasted years. This process can be grasped through the artist’s drawings, which document the conceptual thinking and the many stages of planning that went into his compositions. In attempting to do so, we are effectively peering behind a curtain that David did not particularly want parted. While he was famous for charging exorbitant prices