Murder in the Rue Marat: A Case of Art in Revolution

How an enigmatic masterpiece of the French Revolution became a talisman of the revolutionary spirit in our own time

Jacques-Louis David’s The Death of Marat depicts the painter’s friend and fellow revolutionary Jean-Paul Marat collapsed in his bath after being fatally stabbed by a female assassin who stands just outside the frame. In this fascinating book, Thomas Crow traces the radical legacy of a painting that has been called the Pietà of the French Revolution, showing how David’s masterpiece captures the saga of that violent era in the single figure of Marat, and how it reveals itself anew today.

Crow begins by describing how the painting’s enduring power came to the fore during the countercultural tumult of the 1960s, discussing how his vocation as a scholar arose out of his own encounter with the work. He then takes readers back to 1793, telling the story of the painting’s creation through the eyes of David, his subject, and Marat’s charismatic assassin, Charlotte Corday. Charting the history of its impact across more than two centuries, Crow shows how this multilayered portrait surfaced in succeeding waves of political dissent as an enduring talisman of popular insurgency.

Beautifully illustrated, Murder in the Rue Marat is an art historian’s disarmingly personal account of a painting whose hidden complexities bear witness to the promise and peril of revolution in Marat’s time and our own.

Thomas Crow is the Rosalie Solow Professor of Modern Art at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts. His many books include Restoration: The Fall of Napoleon in the Course of European Art, 1812-1820 and The Artist in the Counterculture: Bruce Conner to Mike Kelley and Other Tales from the Edge (both Princeton).