The Triumph of Marat

Louis-Léopold Boilly painted The Triumph of Marat around 1794, depicting the street celebration that followed Marat's acquittal on charges of inciting violence in 1793 — just months before his assassination by Charlotte Corday. The painting is an extraordinary document of Revolutionary popular culture: the crowd carrying the acquitted journalist through the streets of Paris in a spontaneous triumph that foreshadowed and ironized the assassinated martyr cult that David's Death of Marat would create shortly afterward. Boilly's skill in rendering crowd scenes — the variety of individual faces and gestures within a mass of people — gives this political street scene its historical immediacy.

Boilly renders the crowded street procession with his characteristic precision and attention to individual faces in the crowd. The small scale and meticulous detail create a documentary quality that captures the Revolution's popular spectacles with almost photographic accuracy.