Neoclassicism for beginners: virtue in marble

How to read the labels Historical what the old sources say. Later tradition what later writers added. Modern modern practice and my own notes.

The century from about 1750 to 1870 was an age of revolutions: American, French, Haitian, industrial. Its first great style, Neoclassicism, looked back to Greece and Rome for models of virtue and order. After the curls and pastels of the Rococo, it offered clear outlines, stable compositions and serious subjects. It also coincided with the moment when modern chemistry pushed alchemy out of the laboratory.

Three layers

Historical What the works and the academies show. Later tradition How later ages used the classical ideal. Modern How we see it now.

Digging up the past

Historical Excavations at Herculaneum from 1738 and Pompeii from 1748 brought Roman houses and wall paintings back into view. Travellers on the Grand Tour carried home souvenirs. Johann Joachim Winckelmann praised the “noble simplicity and quiet grandeur” of Greek sculpture in 1755, and his History of the Art of Antiquity (1764) made Greek art the measure of beauty. He knew it mostly through Roman copies and imagined it pure white.

The academy and its rules

Historical The French Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture, founded in 1648, trained artists and ran the official exhibition, the Salon. Students drew from casts of ancient statues and then from the nude model, a class closed to women. In 1770 the Academy limited women members to four.

Adélaïde Labille-Guiard, Self-Portrait with Two Pupils, Marie Gabrielle Capet (1761 to 1818) and Marie Marguerite Carraux de Rosemond (1765 to 1788), 1785. The Metropolitan Museum of Art (53.225.5). Image: Open Access, public domain (CC0).

Adélaïde Labille-Guiard, one of the four, painted this large self-portrait in 1785. She sits at the easel in shimmering silk while her pupils Marie Gabrielle Capet and Marie Marguerite Carreaux de Rosemond stand behind her. It is both a display of skill and an argument: women should be allowed to train women.

David

Historical Jacques-Louis David (1748 to 1825) became the leading painter of the movement. His scenes of virtuous Romans and Greeks, with sculptural figures and stage-like settings, carried messages about duty and sacrifice. The Met’s Death of Socrates (1787) shows the philosopher reaching for the hemlock while teaching his grieving friends. David became a revolutionary, voted for the execution of Louis XVI, painted the murdered Marat and later served Napoleon. Antonio Canova (1757 to 1822) carved marble with cool, smooth perfection.

In 1800 Marie-Guillemine Benoist showed a portrait of a Black woman, a servant in her brother-in-law’s household, at the Salon. Long given a demeaning title, it was renamed Portrait of Madeleine in 2019, after the sitter’s name was found in records.

The esoteric angle

Jacques Louis David, Antoine Laurent Lavoisier (1743 to 1794) and Marie Anne Lavoisier (Marie Anne Pierrette Paulze, 1758 to 1836), 1788. The Metropolitan Museum of Art (1977.10). Image: Open Access, public domain (CC0).

Historical In 1788 David painted the chemist Antoine Lavoisier and his wife Marie-Anne Paulze Lavoisier. Glass flasks and other instruments stand on the table. Marie-Anne had studied drawing with David, and she drew the plates of laboratory equipment for her husband’s Traité élémentaire de chimie (1789). That book set out a new list of chemical elements and the principle that matter is conserved in reactions. It closed the long era in which alchemy and chemistry were one science. Lavoisier, also a tax farmer, was guillotined in 1794.

Later tradition Alchemy did not disappear. It moved from the furnace to the soul, and nineteenth-century occultists reread it as spiritual transformation.

Modern Many witches today use alchemical symbols for inner work. That is a later reading, and a fruitful one.

Try it yourself

Put David’s Death of Socrates (Met 31.45) beside Turner’s Whalers (Met 96.29). For each, describe the edges of forms, the color, the composition and the role of the human figure. Then write one sentence on what each painting asks of you.

Before and after

Before this: Rococo.

After this: Romanticism.

See every movement in order on the art movements timeline, or learn to look step by step in the free Art History for Beginners course.