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 in 1809. The London School of Economics, which covers most of Clare Market nowadays, retains some squash and real tennis courts in its older buildings. Tudor-style real tennis courts were long, high-ceiling buildings, with galleries for spectators; their dimensions — about 75 by 30 feet — are similar to the earlier theatres, and much larger than a modern tennis court. The tennis courts were not used exclusively for tennis. In 1653, seven years before it saw lawful use as a theatre, an underground production of Killigrew's "Claricilla" was planned for Gibbon's court. The production was broken up before it debuted,