4. The Death Of Marat – Jacques- Louis David, 1793
The Death of Marat ( La Mort de Marat or Marat Assassiné) is a striking painting by French Jacques- Louis David of the murdered French revolutionary leader Jean-Paul Marat. The work is one of the most famous images of the Revolution. David was the leading French painter, as well as a member of the revolutionary Committee of General Security. The painting shows the radical journalist lying dead in his bath on 13 July 1793 after his murder by a future victim of the guillotine, Charlotte Cordray. This great political work was painted in the months after Marat’s murder, it has been described by TJ Clark as the first modernist painting, for “the way it took the stuff of politics as its material and did not transmute it”.