There is first of all a portrait depicting the artist at the period of his imprisonment (Fig. 22). It is seldom that a self portrait expresses so vividly the perplexities of a period of terror as do the haunted eyes of this young fanatic. These eyes have been called evil, and David himself described as a good artist but an evil man. The moral equipment of the revolutionaries cannot be summarized in such simple fashion, however. David’s political opponents hit nearer the mark when they called him to the defence of Marat, “What does that prove so far as Marat is concerned? Only the devotion of an honorable man who is allowing himself to be carried away by excitement.” That David’s political life was so passionate, may be due in part to the youthful violence of his friends. Nearly all the revolutionary leaders were in their early thirties, an age which is apt to be the stormy period of a man’s life. Old people do not bring about revolutions. David, to be sure, was forty at the time of its outbreak, but see how youthful he still looked; and the unspent store of his strength is proved by the great age to which he lived. He painted another important work during his imprisonment--a little landscape of the Luxembourg Gardens as seen from his window (now in the Louvre), one of the first modern realistic landscapes which seem to foreshadow Courbet’s efforts. The eighteenth-century conception of landscape was very different. The landscapes were like theatrical scenery, built up with carefully divided “wings.” Here, for the first time, a French artist dared to paint an unpromising bit of earth exactly as he saw it, with all nature’s accidental qualities. A garden fence in the middle runs diagonally across the picture, while over in one corner is an avenue of trees which should conventionally have been in the center of the canvas--no planned symmetrical construction, no coulisses in the foreground. Here, too, was a break with tradition--a new beginning.