Jacques-Louis David
Jacques-Louis David was born into a prosperous French family in Paris on 30 August 1748. When he was about nine his father was killed in a duel and his mother left him with his well-off architect uncles. They saw to it that he received an excellent education at the Collège des Quatre-Nations, University of Paris, but he was never a good student-- he had a facial tumor that impeded his speech, and he was always preoccupied with drawing. He covered his notebooks with drawings, and he once said, "I was always hiding behind the instructor's chair, drawing for the duration of the class". Soon, he desired to be a painter, but his uncles and mother wanted him to be an architect. He overcame the opposition, and went to learn from François Boucher (1703–1770), the leading painter of the time, who was also a distant relative. Boucher was a Rococo painter, but tastes were changing, and the fashion for Rococo was giving way to a more classical style. Boucher decided that instead of taking over David's tutelage, he would send David to his friend, Joseph-Marie Vien (1716–1809), a painter who embraced the classical reaction to Rococo. There, David attended the Royal Academy, based in what is now the Louvre.
Marijac
Jacques Dumas was born in Paris in 1908. He started his career as a comics artist in te 1930s and used the pen name Marijac. His best known character in this period was the cowboy "Jim Boum", which appeared in "Cœurs Vaillants". During the war, he entered the Resistance and started the popular magazine "Coq Hardi", where he created the series "Les trois mousquetaires du maquis". The magazine existed from 1944 until 1963. His focus then shifted to the writing of comics for well known French artists like Raymond Cazanave ("Capitaine Fantôme"), Raymond Poivet ("Colonel X"), Dut, Mathelot, Étienne Le Rallic ("Poncho Libertas"), Kline, Trubert, and Calvo ("Coquin"). In later years, he continued to work as an editor at magazines aimaed at girls or younger children like "Mireille", "Frimousse" and "Nano et Nanette".