Much more than is commonly thought, David deserves the title of ‘Father of modern painting’, a title which Delacroix had given to him. Openly or by indirect means his influence worked throughout the nineteenth century.
To the classical artists, to Ingres and his pupils, he has passed on the ideas, the language, the feeling for formal beauty and the prescriptive right of the spirit to explain the phenomena of life, which it was his task to make clear.
But to the Romantics, his legacy has been all the deeper felt for its concealment.
What David loved in ancient Rome, what he himself sought above all, was the power to exceed human limitations by straining his energy and stretching his power to their limit: but unlike the Romantics, he thought he could achieve through the constraint of discipline rather than by an explosion of the passions.
It was Géricault who called David ‘the first of our artists, the regenerator of our school’.
R. Huyghe