The later phases of Jacques-Louis David’s career have received far less attention than his earlier work during the Ancien Régime and Revolution. Art in general during Napoleon’s Consulate and Empire has, perhaps surprisingly, been comparatively neglected until recently. Philippe Bordes’s exhibition and catalogue are an extremely valuable contribution to the reassessment of David’s later career and to an understanding of art in France in the first quarter of the nineteenth century. Bordes, a professor at the Université Lyon 2, was the founding director of the Musée de la Révolution française in Vizille and has published extensively on David and French art at the end of the eighteenth century. It might be easy to overlook how unprecedented Bordes’s endeavors are: this is the first monographic exhibition in the United States of David’s work and the first sustained exploration of the artist’s work for Napoleon and of his subsequent exile in Brussels. As Bordes himself notes in his preface, fourteen of the twenty-seven paintings in the exhibition and catalogue and fourteen of the twenty-nine drawings were not included in the landmark David exhibition of 1989–90 at the Louvre and Versailles (Jacques-Louis David, 1748–1825, Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux, 1989). He was able...