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.
Jules David
Jean-Baptiste David died in 1892.
In 1987 his sketchbooks were shown in an exhibition called "Fashion drawings of Jules David (1808–1892) and his time" at the Salon du Vieux-Colombier, town hall of the sixth arrondissement, Paris.
During his long career, the fashionable figure was transformed.
The delicate Dresden figurine of 1870, dressed in a modest, elaborate and very feminine style, was displaced by the "seven foot beauty with the ten inch waist" of 1893. The modern woman of 1893 was much more self-confident and her dress much more revealing and sophisticated than would have been suitable twenty years earlier.