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The book begins with a close examination of the work David produced while in prison. Lajer-Burcharth first considers the artist's self-representation focusing on Self-Portrait and Abandoned Psyche, and addresses his crisis of individual identity. She goes on to look at David's effort to redefine himself as a history painter after the Terror and at his engagement with the collective memory of the Revolution. In her analysis of the broader search for a new republican identity, the author frames her discussion around David's Sabine Women, the sketches for which he had prepared in prison, and places special attention on the privileged role of women and femininity as signs that both David and other citizens employed to establish distance and difference from the Terror. The book concludes with a brilliant interpretation of David's unfinished portrait of Juliette Recamier and its complex relation to the process of cultural reinvention of the self as a function of desire.
