The Tennis Court Oath (David) – pre-Romantic, near-unanimous, almost totally middle-class and with no popular violence – above all was considered the forerunner of the 1789 revolution and also showed that national sovereignty was made up of each individual's personal will. David's painting also portrays the monk Dom Gerle alongside the Protestant pastor Jean-Paul Rabaut Saint-Étienne, symbolising a new era of religious tolerance. The wind blowing through the windows and billowing the curtains also symbolises the wind of Revolution blowing through France. The first engravings showing "The Tennis Court Oath" only appeared in 1790, the year David convinced the Jacobin Club to launch a national
Gibbon's Tennis Court France: converting tennis courts into theatres. Killigrew's remodelled Gibbon's Tennis Court opened first, on 8 November 1660, just two months after being given permission by the Crown. The design was similar to the earlier Elizabethan-era "private" theatres, such as the theatre in Blackfriars: a stage devoid of scenery facing a bench-filled pit on the auditorium floor and surrounded by one or two levels of U-shaped galleries. Not long after the opening, on 20 November, avid theatre-goer Samuel Pepys attended his first performance at Vere Street: …Mr. Shepley and I to the new Play-house near Lincoln’s-Inn-Fields (which was formerly Gibbon’s tennis-court),