La Mort de Sénèque

Seneca, condemned for conspiring against Nero, opens his veins in the bath while his wife Paulina insists on sharing his fate; a physician deepens the wound, a slave offers poison, and a centurion watches at the back of the scene. Jacques-Louis David submitted the canvas to the Grand Prix de Rome of 1773 — his third attempt — and the jury, unconvinced by a composition still rococo in its elegance, refused him the prize he won the following year, after which Rome turned him into the leading painter of Neoclassicism. The painting is held in the Petit Palais, musée des Beaux-arts de la Ville de Paris.