Neoclassicism was the style that revived the clarity and moral seriousness of Greek and Roman art from about 1760 into the 1830s, replacing the Rococo across Europe. Its paintings show stern subjects from ancient history, figures with crisp contours lined up like a relief, and smooth, restrained color. It began in Rome, where news of the excavations at Herculaneum and Pompeii, the trade in antiquities and young travelers on the Grand Tour came together. The name came only in the mid-19th century; contemporaries spoke of a true or reformed style.
The German scholar Johann Joachim Winckelmann, who settled in Rome in 1755, gave the movement its program. In his Thoughts on the Imitation of Greek Works (1755) and History of Ancient Art (1764) he urged artists to imitate the Greeks, praising in their art a noble simplicity and quiet grandeur. He called his friend Anton Raphael Mengs the greatest artist of the age; Mengs painted Parnassus on a ceiling of the Villa Albani in Rome in 1761. In Paris, Joseph-Marie Vien based The Cupid Seller (1763, Château de Fontainebleau) on a Roman wall painting reproduced in the published volumes of the Herculaneum excavations.
Figures stand in a shallow space parallel to the picture plane, often in profile, like a carved frieze. Contours are sharp, drawing comes before color, and the brushwork is smoothed to an enamel-like finish. Settings are bare: a few columns, an arch, a plain wall. The subjects are lessons in virtue, such as patriotic sacrifice, stoic death or loyalty, drawn from Homer, Livy and Plutarch.
Jacques-Louis David (1748-1825) gave the style its force. His Oath of the Horatii (1784, Louvre), a royal commission he insisted on painting in Rome, caused a sensation at the Salon of 1785. Three brothers swear on the swords their father raises before three plain arches, while the women of the family slump in grief. The Death of Socrates (1787, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) followed. During the Revolution David sat in the National Convention, voted for the execution of Louis XVI and directed official art. In The Death of Marat (1793, Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels) the murdered journalist lies in his bath in the pose of a dead Christ, before a bare, dark wall.
Under Napoleon the style turned imperial. David painted Napoleon Crossing the Alps (1801, Château de Malmaison) on a rearing horse and the vast Coronation of Napoleon (1805-1807, Louvre). His pupil Antoine-Jean Gros showed the general touching a sick man in Bonaparte Visiting the Plague Victims of Jaffa (1804, Louvre), and François Gérard painted a porcelain-smooth Cupid and Psyche (1798, Louvre). The antique taste reached fashion too: in 1788 Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun had given a Greek supper at which the ladies wore white tunics, and David’s Madame Récamier (1800, Louvre) reclines barefoot in white on an antique couch. After Napoleon’s fall David went into exile in Brussels, where he died.
The style spread through artists who had studied in Rome. Angelica Kauffman, trained in Italy, became a founding member of the Royal Academy in London in 1768. The American Benjamin West, also formed in Rome, staged a modern death in uniform like a classical lament in The Death of General Wolfe (1770, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa). John Flaxman’s outline engravings for the Iliad and the Odyssey (1793), with figures in pure profile, carried the graphic manner across Europe. In sculpture, Antonio Canova and Bertel Thorvaldsen, both based in Rome, gave the ideal its marble form.
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780-1867), David’s most famous pupil, exhibited at the Salon for more than sixty years from 1802 and always put drawing first. Critics disliked the rigid, frontal splendor of his Napoleon I on His Imperial Throne (1806, Musée de l’Armée, Paris). At the Salon of 1819 they complained that his Grande Odalisque (1814, Louvre) had too many vertebrae. His rivalry with Eugène Delacroix set the line of Neoclassicism against the color of Romanticism, although Ingres himself also painted Orientalist and medieval subjects. After the 1830s the style survived mainly in the teaching of the academies.
