The Man Who Painted The Terror

Tom Holland (0:09)

Hello, everyone, and welcome to a French Revolution-themed Rest Is History bonus, because this week we have begun our six-part series on The Terror, the bloody climax of the story of the French Revolution. And in our first episode, we covered one of the most iconic scenes of the whole story of the French Revolution, namely the murder in his bath of Marat, the friend of the people. And one of the reasons that it's so iconic isn't just the drama of the story, but the fact that one of the great paintings illustrates it. And when we come to the topic of paintings, there is really only one person for The Rest Is History to turn to, and that is Laura Cumming, who has featured on The Rest Is History last year, covering assorted great works of art. She's the art critic for The Observer, the author of numerous brilliant books, all of which I highly recommend you rush out and buy. And Laura, you have claimed that this painting by David of Marat in His Bath is the greatest painting of political history in art.

Before we come to your justification for that claim, could we first of all just describe for those people who have never seen the painting or who do not have a copy of the painting in front of them as they're listening to this, just give them a description of what the painting shows.

Laura Cumming (1:40)

When you first see this painting, which hangs in Brussels in a museum, what you're seeing is an enormous volume of golden light bearing down upon a figure at the bottom of the painting. The figure is of course Marat, and he has been working in this bath, writing away, and you can see on the top of the wooden crate he's been using as a desk, the proofs bloodstained of the newspaper he edits. He himself is lying back, slumped. It's always described as a Pieter. So anyone who hasn't seen this painting, think of the body of Christ descending from the cross in the lap of Mary. We've got exactly that scene. One of his arms, very elongated, Michelangelesque, as people say, is dangly out of the bath, and it holds the quill with which he's just been working and writing the mighty journalist of the revolution. The tip of the quill is stubbed out, extinguished upon the ground like a cigarette. That's the end of his writing. He will never write again. What you see is the pierced chest open to the eye.

He's half naked in the bath, and his head is covered in white bindings, like a turban to keep his hair out of his face while he works. But what you're seeing is this tremendous dying saint laid out before you in a bath that has now effectively become his coffin.

Tom Holland (3:14)

So for those, I'm sure very few who are listening to this, rather than having listened to our first episode. Just to remind people, Marat is one of the great demagogues of the French Revolution, the master journalist, friend of the people, he calls himself. He has been murdered in his bath by a woman from Caen, called Charlotte Corday, who will be guillotined very shortly afterwards for the offense. Marat will become a kind of saint for the Jacobin, for the Patriots in the French Revolution, and Charlotte Corday will become a kind of martyr for royalists and for counter-revolutionaries more generally. So there is a very, very emotionally turbulent mood around the murder and the way that it is going to be represented both in people's imaginings and in the dimension of illustrations. Before we come though to what David is doing in this painting, Laura, could you just give us a very brief sketch of who David is and what his career has been prior to his work on the murder of Marat?

Because he has a really extraordinary life, doesn't he?

Laura Cumming (4:28)

He does. As we go through this episode, you're going to hear unbelievable volt-fas all the way through. And his earliest volt-fas, I think, is the way he starts as a painter. So he's born in Paris, quite comfortable, 1748 He's older than all of the other revolutionaries.

His father's a merchant. He's killed in a duel when the boy is quite young. His mother turns him over to his uncles who are architects. They send him to a very good school, so he gets a decent education. He is obviously precocious and draws beautifully, so they send him off to the master of Rococo art in Paris at this point, who is Boucher, who is the painter of fluff that people now do not like. Bare bottoms, white kittens, frightfully lovely frogs, lots of froths and frills, and Boucher quite rapidly works out that this youngster, teenager at this point, isn't really going to be his painter. He sends him off to another artist called Vian, who is a classicist. That's to say, he paints rather severe paintings. He often paints the ancient Roman and Greek past, and he finds in this young man a willing acolyte.