David's wife was born Marguerite-Charlotte Pécoul, the daughter of M. Pécoul, the contractor responsible for the buildings at the Louvre where David had been granted a coveted artist's lodging by the king^[2]. In the course of that professional arrangement, Pécoul proposed that David marry his daughter. The marriage brought David financial security as well as a family, and his father-in-law later helped fund his journey to Rome to paint The Oath of the Horatii, on the grounds that, as David reportedly put it, only in Rome could he paint Romans^[2].

David and Marguerite-Charlotte Pécoul had four children together: two sons, Eugène, born in 1784, and Jules, born in 1783, who both became military officers, and two daughters whom David painted on more than one occasion^[1]. His studio grew alongside his family, expanding rapidly to as many as fifty pupils in these years, a scale of operation that the security of his marriage and his father-in-law's support had helped make possible^[2].

The marriage did not run smoothly through the political upheaval of the French Revolution. David and his wife separated in 1790 and divorced in 1794, only to remarry in 1796^[1]. Whether the break was political or personal is not clearly recorded. A letter Madame David wrote to her husband in August 1795, during the separation, speaks of regretting her own 'thoughtlessness', without specifying what that meant; for his part, David, when arrested during this period, was found living with a woman named Joséphine Tallard, thought to be a relative of the sitter for a different, unrelated portrait now in the Louvre^[1]. Beyond these fragments, little is recorded of what drove the couple apart or brought them back together.