Artist who backed the wrong emperor

Some paintings are so familiar it's easy to dismiss the artist's genius. One may forget that a career consisted of more than, say, an image of a Campbell's soup can or a Renaissance woman with an enigmatic smile. Jacques-Louis David is one such artist. While his name may not be familiar, his iconic images are. Think Napoleon on the back of a rearing white horse and you're in the right gallery.

David was the most celebrated painter of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, known around the world for the large Neoclassical history paintings that celebrate his beloved French Revolution and, eventually, his somewhat confusing devotion to the Emperor Napoleon. Many art critics call him one of the first "modern" artists. His life was extraordinarily long (1748 to 1825) and productive, despite the fact that near the end of it, the former revolutionary was banished from post-Napoleonic Paris for his earlier associations. The man who once helped found the Louvre Museum in Paris spent the final decade of his life in Brussels, away from centers of the art world for the first time in his life. There, until his death, he taught students and explored less political and more personal themes in portraits and allegorical paintings.

Despite David's fame and influence on successive generations, no museum in the United States has hosted a show on the French artist. In 1989, the Louvre mounted a David retrospective, including canvases from his early career that are permanently installed there due to their sheer size. However, no exhibition has focused exclusively on the final 30 years of his career. With "Jacques-Louis David:

Empire to Exile," scholars have put an end to this oversight, according to William Griswold, acting director of the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. "He was the primary image maker of Napoleon," he says, adding, it's time to address David's entire career.

Curator Scott Schaefer says that he felt so strongly about the need for such a show that he made the mounting of this exhibition a condition of his employment when he was recruited by the Getty. "David's late works are incredibly moving and personal," he says, "this is a beautiful exhibition that has been a long time in gestation."

The show opens with the famous image of Napoleon on horseback. "I did that consciously, because everyone knows that image, even if they've never heard the artist's name," says Mr. Schaefer. From there, the 26 paintings and 22 drawings reveal the preoccupations of this artist in his late prime: intimate portraits of friends and family members, meditations on classical themes such as Cupid and Psyche, and, of course, Napoleon.

An emerging modern sensibility runs through them all, Schaefer says. "David has a great self-awareness of his own career," says the curator. When he paints Napoleon on the rearing horse, he is consciously referring to and trying to outdo great artists from past eras, such as Titian and Velásquez. "He's offering his own version of those great traditions."

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