Jacques-Louis David | Death of Marat

About The Death of Marat by Jacques-Louis David

Jean-Paul Marat was a radical journalist and one of the loudest voices of the French Revolution. A painful skin condition forced him to spend much of his day in a medicinal bath, where he kept working, writing on a board laid across the tub. On 13 July 1793 a young woman named Charlotte Corday talked her way into his apartment carrying a note that promised the names of traitors, and stabbed him once through the chest. She was guillotined four days later.

David was Marat's friend, a fellow Jacobin deputy, and had visited him at the bath the previous day. He finished this painting within months, and it was hung in the courtyard of the Louvre as a public memorial — a piece of revolutionary propaganda made by someone who was genuinely grieving.

What he produced is not a crime scene. David removed the skin disease entirely and gave Marat the smooth, idealised body of a classical martyr, arm falling over the side of the tub in a pose lifted straight from Christian images of the dead Christ. Corday's letter is still in his hand. The wooden crate he used as a desk carries a dedication: À Marat, David. And above all of it, taking up nearly half the canvas, there is nothing at all.

The Death of Marat at a glance

• Artist: Jacques-Louis David (1748–1825)
• Painted: 1793, Paris
• Movement: Neoclassicism
• Original: Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels
• Medium: Oil on canvas, 162 × 128 cm

Common questions about The Death of Marat

Own a hand-painted Death of Marat

This is not a print. Every painting we sell is reproduced in oils on canvas, by hand, by professional artists — no giclée, no computer-generated technique.

Nearly half of this canvas is empty, and everything the painting does depends on that emptiness not feeling like a blank. It is not flat black. David scumbled and dragged the paint across it so the void is faintly mottled, breathing, alive with brush movement you can see but not quite resolve — a space rather than a wall. Printed, that whole upper half resolves to an even dark rectangle, and the picture turns into a body with a blank slab above it. Worked by hand in oils, the void keeps its texture, and the silence above Marat stays charged.

• A range of sizes — choose yours above. The original is a tall upright, and the composition needs that height for the empty space to register.
• Framed and ready to hang, gallery wrap, or rolled canvas if you would rather frame it yourself.
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* Below is an example of a customer who chose the Gold Ornate frame

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The back of the Stretched Gallery Wrap looks like the image below - it has a hanging wire!

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