Although many of Jacques-Louis David’s best-known paintings are in French public collections, over the past century U.S. institutions such as the Cleveland Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art, the Kimbell Art Museum, the Getty Museum, and the Clark Art Institute have managed to snap up significant works by the artist. The presence in the United States of these images, which date mainly from the Napoleonic Empire and David’s period of post-Napoleonic exile in Brussels, was the stimulus for an exhibition of David’s late work at both the Getty and the Clark last year. The exhibition was accompanied by a substantial and meticulously researched catalogue written by Philippe Bordes. Scholars writing about David have long viewed the material featured in the exhibition as less important than the painter’s earlier production. Though highly regarded by some writers in the nineteenth- and early-twentieth centuries, the Napoleonic pictures were eclipsed in subsequent scholarly discourse by the groundbreaking history paintings of the 1780s and the images David produced during the Revolution. The Brussels pictures dropped out of view even earlier. Partly to meet the needs of teleological narratives focused on Ingres and Delacroix, the paintings were already marked in the mid-nineteenth century as...