Oath of the Horatii is a large painting by the French artist Jacques-Louis David painted in 1784 and 1785 and now on display in the Louvre in Paris. The painting immediately became a huge success with critics and the public and remains one of the best-known paintings in the Neoclassical style.
Oath of the Horatii
David's The Lictors Bring to Brutus the Bodies of His Sons, 1789
Oath of the Horatii, a second smaller version painted in 1786 by David and his pupil Girodet, now in Toledo, Ohio
Study for Camilla, black chalk and white highlights
Jacques-Louis David was a French painter in the Neoclassical style, considered to be the preeminent painter of the era. In the 1780s, his cerebral brand of history painting marked a change in taste away from Rococo frivolity toward classical austerity, severity, and heightened feeling, which harmonized with the moral climate of the final years of the Ancien Régime.
Self-Portrait, 1794 (Musée du Louvre)
Portrait of David as a youth, c. 1765, by his tutor Joseph-Marie Vien
Mademoiselle Guimard as Terpsichore, 1774–1775, an early work
Equestrian portrait of Stanisław Kostka Potocki (1781)