David portrays the last moments of the boy and forms a narrative around the story that radically dramatized the circumstances of Bara's death, in accordance with Robespierre's pro-revolutionary propaganda.

[1][2] In his own personal report of these events, Robespierre elevates the death of Bara to serve as a model of undying and almost blind support of the French Republic, glory, virtue and fatherhood.

[3] Robespierre enlisted the help of David in paying tribute to Bara's death with the intention that the painting would represent "absolute virtue, simple and modest, as it is delivered from the hands of Nature".

[2] His painting of Bara demonstrates a commitment to displaying feelings of pride, sorrow, and pain resulting from the revolution, reflecting sentiments held by both the rebels and of David himself.

[2] The unfinished painting displays only the naked body of an androgynous figure lying horizontally, grasping a letter and a red, white, and blue cockade.

Bara's pose, recalling both antiquity, such as the Hermaphrodite by Bernini, and the innovations of David's contemporaries, such as Girodet's The Sleep of Endymion, further emphasizes his curved hips, elongated torso, his figure's flowing hair, and absence of genitalia.

[3] Thus David stated in a speech to the National Convention that he intended to contrast the youthful, innocent and feminine nature of Bara to "those effeminate sybarites [meaning young loyalists] whose corrupted souls prevent them from having any virtue and whose idle arms carry only numbers and accounts, testimony to their adulterous affairs.