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.
Green Party of Canada candidates in the 2006 Canadian federal election
David Lee was born on February 18, 1968. David was raised in Barrie and Peterborough, Ontario, where he served as an infantry scout, and later, still seventeen, as a squad leader in the Hastings & Prince Edward Mechanized Infantry Regiment. He then put himself through school as a door-to-door salesman earning a B.A. in literature, history, and critical theory from Trent University. After graduation he travelled and then became a tradesman. At the age of twenty-six David spent a year with two friends deep in the woods of the Smoky Mountains of northern Georgia building a log cabin from scratch, living off the land without electricity, and farming its adjacent field.