We need only to compare a portrait of David’s style like the one of Madame de Servan (Fig. 1) with portraits of his predecessors (Figs. 2 and 3) in order to recognize the difference between the Rococo period and the new era, introduced by David. This portrait of Madame de Servan, painted about 1800,[1] impresses one as a composition of statuesque simplicity expressing the salient spirit of a period which was seeking fundamentally new doctrines by which to govern life. The portrait by Rigaud, the famous court painter of the reign of Louis XIV, painted in the beginning of the century, and of Boucher’s portrait of Madame de Pompadour, painted in 1758, do not differ too much from another in style. In these portraits of the Rococo period the surface is filled with a restless play of short-curving lines; light and shadow are alternated perpetually at close intervals; the colors form a pleasing pattern of small variegated patches, and the costume and accessories almost eclipse the real motif--that of portraiture. In David’s canvas the figure emerges clearly from a wide and empty space, and a clear, flowing line with definite horizontals and verticals has replaced the tortuous curves. It seems an extraordinary piece of daring for the artist to have composed in these broad planes with a completely empty background, when we consider the century-old tradition embodied in the older paintings. It was the French Revolution, with its rejection of old formulas which inspired this daring. But just as the revolution, from prelude to aftermath, covered a span of some twenty years, so the artist required a similar period of time to gradually attain the classic style which we see here stamped with the authority of his fifty years. Jacques Louis David was born in 1748 in the middle of the Louis XV period, and the school which fathered him was that of Boucher, the frank exponent of the playful and elegant school of painting fostered by the artificial social life of Paris. David’s earliest known composition, “Minerva’s Conquest of Mars,” painted in 1771 in the artist’s twenty-third year, and now in the Louvre (Fig. 4), shows Boucher’s influence clearly. Here we still have the unquiet baroque line of pre-revolutionary painting--the picture is full of detail, the draperies worn by the figures flutter in the breeze like those of Boucher and the cherubs beloved of this master float in the clouds. The subject, too, is of the mythologic-allegorical character affected by the painters of the court and the aristocracy. The Goddess of Wisdom conquers the God of War! What irony when we remember that twenty years later during the revolution the painter of this picture was among those who helped let loose on France a war of twenty years’ duration. [Illustration: FIG. 4. MINERVA’S CONQUEST OF MARS (1771) _Louvre, Paris_]