Neoclassicism

It begins in Rome in the 1750s and 1760s, as the excavations at Herculaneum, from 1738, and Pompeii, from 1748, brought ancient painting and objects back into the light. In 1755 the German scholar Johann Joachim Winckelmann urged artists to imitate the Greeks, whose art he praised for its noble simplicity and quiet grandeur.

It reached its height with David's The Oath of the Horatii, painted in Rome in 1784 and shown in Paris in 1785, and it lasted until about 1830, when Ingres was still painting smooth, clear portraits and Romanticism had already taken the young.

David was a revolutionary as well as a painter. He voted for the execution of Louis XVI, and in 1793 he painted his murdered friend, the journalist Jean-Paul Marat, slumped in his bath, holding the letter his killer used to gain entry: The Death of Marat, a modern martyr painted like a Christ taken from the cross.

Under Napoleon he became the first painter of the empire. Napoleon Crossing the Alps shows him calm on a rearing horse; in fact he crossed on a mule. Ingres painted Napoleon I on His Imperial Throne in 1806 like a god in an ancient temple. In London, Angelica Kauffman and Benjamin West, both founding members of the Royal Academy in 1768, carried the style into British history painting.

Romanticism. Even David's own pupils, Antoine-Jean Gros among them, were drawn to color, motion and feeling, and Géricault and Delacroix turned the Salon into a contest between line and color. In the academies, Neoclassical rules lived on for the rest of the century as academic art.