Jacques-Louis David was the Napoleon Boneparte’s First Painter, commissioned to complete his *Coronation *in 1808, and his work has long been recognised as foundational for the rise of modern art. This book offers a new reading of the evolving qualities of some of David’s best-known historical canvases, taking into consideration how they emerged from his preparatory drawing routines. By meticulously recreating David’s process for four of his famous canvases, this author brings new awareness to the ways in which his visual manipulations address questions of human autonomy and stability in the eighteenth-century. Additionally, it demonstrates how notions of authorial agency, freedom, and movement were at the core of David’s most famous artworks and highlights the significance of how the aims and values of his neoclassical work contrasted those of the Romantic period.