Murder in a bathtub

Different strokes

One of the iconic images of the 18th century, ‘The Death of Marat’ has an interesting history, and is hailed as the first modernist painting, notes Giridhar Khasnis.

Painted by the famous French artist Jacques-Louis David, following the gruesome murder of a radical journalist and revolutionary leader, ‘The Death of Marat’ (La Mort De Marat) is one of the iconic images of the 18th century.

Founder of the journal L’Ami du peuple (‘The Friend of the People’), Jean-Paul Marat (1743-1793) was one of the strident voices against the royalists when the French Revolution began in 1789.

Described as ‘short in stature, deformed in person, and hideous in face’, Marat had studied medicine in England, practiced as a doctor in London and Paris, and written scientific and medical works.

Ironically, in later life, he suffered a debilitating and intensely itchy, blistering skin disease, which forced him to spend most of his time in a bathtub and conduct his activities. It was in his bathtub that Marat was stabbed to death by a royalist sympathiser, Charlotte Corday.

The sequence of events on and after the fateful day — July 13, 1793 — is well-documented. Pretending to inform him on counter-revolutionary activities, Corday had gained entry into Marat’s room, and found him in his bathtub soaking with the habitual wet cloth tied about his brow.

Having made small conversation with him, she pulled the knife from her scarf and plunged it into his chest, piercing his lung, aorta and left ventricle. Evidently, Marat’s last words, “Aidez-moi, ma chère amie!” (“Help me, my dear friend!”) had no effect on her.

After committing the act, Corday did not try to flee. She was arrested, put on trial and executed — all in a matter of days. In the court, she remained composed and answered all questions calmly but firmly. “Yes, I recognise it,” she said in disgust when the weapon — a kitchen knife with a six-inch blade — was shown to her for recognition.

She confessed how she had premeditated the act for three months; how she hated Marat ‘for his crimes’; and how she had hoped that by killing him peace could be restored to her country. “I have killed one man to save a hundred thousand,” she said. “I was a Republican long before the Revolution.”

After a trial of six hours, when the jury unanimously sentenced her to die, she heard their verdict unmoved. She was condemned at three o’clock in the afternoon, to be beheaded at eight o’clock the same evening on the Place de la Revolution. “The blood I have spilt, and my own which I am about to shed, are the only sacrifices I can offer the Eternal,” she said before her execution.

“Madame Corday ascended the scaffold with intrepidity,” reported London Times. “She appeared serene and reconciled to death.” The reaction of the crowd which witnessed the event varied from sympathy to spitting.

When the heavy blade of the guillotine fell and her head rolled on the scaffold, on July 17, 1793, Corday was just 10 days shy of her 25th birthday. This was the background in which David made his famous painting, ‘The Death of Marat’.

Religious symbolism

In 1793, David was 35 years old and already a well-established artist having painted among others, ‘The Oath of the Horatii’ (1784) and ‘The Death of Socrates’ (1787), which are considered to be among his significant works to this day. He was a close friend of Marat and it is generally acknowledged that ‘The Death of Marat’, painted in the aftermath of his friend’s murder, was his most significant work.

Apart from being a very important history painting made during the Revolution, it clearly showed and immortalised a contemporary political event — a definite step towards modernity.

“Books about modernism tend to go in for inaugural dates,” wrote acclaimed art historian T J Clark in his famous essay, Farewell to an Idea (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999). “My candidate for the beginning of modernism… is 25 Vendémiaire Year 2 (October 16, 1793, as it came to be known). That was the day a hastily completed painting by Jacques-Louis David, of Marat, the martyred hero of the Revolution — Marat à son dernier soupir, David called it early on — was released into the public realm.”

Critics and historians agree that the painting is a powerful one, an idealised portrait of a slain leader, created during an important point in history. Although both David and Marat were atheists, the painting itself is seen to resemble several famous religious paintings, including Michelangelo’s ‘Pietà’ and Caravaggio’s ‘Entombment of Christ.’ The sheer uniqueness of the composition, its hidden tension and emotional depth, heightened by a dark, deathly background, has charmed and intrigued the viewer over centuries.

“The translucent white of Marat’s skin, sheeting and ivory-handled knife is juxtaposed to the deep red of a martyr’s blood,” describes Tristram Hunt (The Guardian / Jan 2007). “The tools of his demagoguery — the feathers, ink and jottings — surround him as the bath uniquely identifies him as Marat: a martyr as much to his eczema as the revolutionary cause.

But the pull of the painting lies in its religious symbolism: a secular pietà with Marat as citizen-saint brought down from the cross into the arms of the people. No wonder, on its completion, the painting was carried in triumph through the streets of Paris from David’s studio to the Louvre’s Salon of the Republic.”

David, who organised an elaborate funeral for Marat, was said to have been a large man with dark penetrating eyes who bore an aura of absolute authority. For many, he was the Revolution’s chief artist. His persona was seen as insubordinate and anarchistic, ‘tinctured with blasphemy in respect to religion and government’. He was hailed as a triumphant reformer of artistic ideals who almost single-handedly altered the direction of art in the post-Revolution social structure.

While his artistic skills and abilities were seldom questioned, historians recognise that David’s personality was a bundle of contradictions. He was seen to quickly change allegiances and manage to survive under different regimes. He was also accused of being a man with weak ethical standards who did not hesitate to commit reprehensible crimes in order to rise to political and artistic prominence.

“David’s most amazing accomplishment of all was living to the ripe old age of 77 with his head still attached to the rest of him,” wrote Michael Kilian (Chicago Tribune/ February 25, 2005).

“His day, don’t you know, spanned not only the reign of David’s original royal patron, the befuddled Louis XVI, but the chaos, brutality, tyranny and blood-splashed lunacy of the French Revolution that followed, not to speak of the ascendancy of general-turned-dictator-turned-supreme monarch Napoleon Bonaparte and, finally, the restoration of the old French Royal Family and David’s exile to dull Brussels, where the food is good but it rains a lot.”

Spending his last 10 years as an exile, David died on December 29, 1825 and was buried amidst great pomp in a church in Brussels.