The Death of Socrates by David: Hemlock, Loyalty, and Light (1787)
An old man sits upright on a prison bed, bare-chested, one hand raised towards heaven, the other reaching, without looking, for a cup of poison. Around him, his friends are falling apart with grief. The young man who hands him the cup turns away and covers his eyes. Only Socrates is calm, still talking, still teaching. Jacques-Louis David's The Death of Socrates, painted in 1787 and now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, is one of the purest statements of Neoclassicism: a lesson in courage, reason and duty, carved in paint.
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Artist: Jacques-Louis David (1748–1825)
Date: 1787
Medium: Oil on canvas, 129.5 × 196.2 cm
Collection: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (31.45), Gallery 634
First shown: Paris Salon, 1787
What is the story?
In 399 BC the Athenian philosopher Socrates was tried and condemned to death, accused of rejecting the gods of the city and corrupting its youth with his teaching. He could have escaped into exile, and his friends offered to arrange it, but he refused: he would not break the laws of Athens, even unjust ones, nor abandon his beliefs to save his life. On the day of his execution he spent his last hours discussing the immortality of the soul with his disciples, then drank the hemlock calmly. The scene is told by Plato in the dialogue Phaedo, which was David's main source.
What does the painting show?
David sets the scene in a bare stone prison, lit by a hard, clear light that falls from the left. Socrates sits at the centre, his body strong and idealised, almost like an ancient statue, although the real philosopher was about seventy. His raised left hand points upwards, to the realm of ideas and the immortal soul he is describing; his right hand reaches for the cup. The gesture is a masterstroke: the philosopher continues his argument even as he accepts death.
His disciples respond in different ways. Crito, seated beside him, grips his thigh and gazes into his face. Others lean against the wall, cover their faces or raise their hands in despair. At the foot of the bed sits an old man, turned away from the scene, his head bowed: this is Plato. In fact Plato, by his own account, was ill and absent that day, and he was young, but David includes him as the witness who would preserve the story. In the background, through an archway, Socrates's wife Xanthippe climbs the stairs, waving a last farewell. On the floor lie the chains removed from the prisoner's legs.
A manifesto of Neoclassicism
The painting was shown at the Paris Salon of 1787 and was immediately hailed as a masterpiece. The Met quotes the English engraver and publisher John Boydell, who wrote to Sir Joshua Reynolds that it was the greatest effort of art since the Sistine Chapel and the Stanze of Raphael, and that it would have done honour to the Athens of Pericles.
Three years earlier, David had made his name with The Oath of the Horatii, another image of stoic self-sacrifice. In both, he uses a shallow stage, frieze-like figures, sharp outlines and restrained colour, in deliberate contrast to the playful Rococo style of the previous generation. Two years after the Socrates, the French Revolution broke out, and David became its leading painter. For the young Socrates as a teacher, compare François-André Vincent's Alcibiades Being Taught by Socrates; for Socrates among the other philosophers of antiquity, Raphael's The School of Athens.
Where can you see it?
The painting entered the Metropolitan Museum in 1931 through the Catharine Lorillard Wolfe Collection and Wolfe Fund. It hangs in Gallery 634 among the museum's European paintings, at The Met Fifth Avenue in New York.
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Sources
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, collection record, The Death of Socrates (31.45); Plato, Phaedo; Wikipedia, “The Death of Socrates”.
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