Neoclassical Art and Paintings

In art, Neoclassicism means a revival of the art of ancient Greece and Rome in the later 1700s and early 1800s. The National Gallery in London explains that the word literally means “new classicism”: artists consciously took up classical models, meaning both ancient art, especially architecture and sculpture, and later painters such as Raphael and Poussin who had followed it. The Getty's art vocabulary dates the style from the mid-18th to the mid-19th century, in Europe and America, and says it was inspired by archaeological discoveries in the Mediterranean.

Sources: National Gallery: Neoclassicism (glossary) · Getty AAT: Neoclassical

Neoclassical art is clear, calm and serious: crisp outlines, balanced and symmetrical compositions, and subjects taken from Greek and Roman history and myth. The Getty's art vocabulary describes Neoclassical works as often linear, symmetrical and even severe, imitating Greek and Roman forms and motifs. The National Gallery in London says David's paintings of the 1780s, such as The Oath of the Horatii, were notable for the austerity of their design and theme, and that a renewed emphasis on the public, teaching role of art helped Neoclassicism rise.

Sources: Getty AAT: Neoclassical · National Gallery: Jacques-Louis David · National Gallery: Neoclassicism (glossary)

Neoclassicism began around 1750 and lasted until about the middle of the 19th century. Tate says it emerged from about 1750, after the discovery of the Roman ruins of Pompeii and the publication in 1764 of Winckelmann's history of ancient art. The Getty's art vocabulary dates the style from the mid-18th to the mid-19th century; in those later years Ingres, the National Gallery in London says, defended a rigid classicism against the Romanticism of Delacroix.

Sources: Tate: Neoclassicism · Getty AAT: Neoclassical · National Gallery: Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres

Neoclassicism started in Rome, among artists studying the remains of antiquity there, and spread to Paris, London and the rest of Europe. The National Gallery in London names the excavation of ancient sites in Italy among its causes, and says the German painter Anton Raphael Mengs, who spent much of his life in Rome, formed his Neoclassical style under the influence of the writer Winckelmann. Jacques-Louis David painted The Oath of the Horatii in Rome and showed it in his Roman studio in 1785 before it went to the Paris Salon, the Louvre records.

Sources: National Gallery: Neoclassicism (glossary) · National Gallery: Anton Raphael Mengs · Louvre Museum · Tate: Neoclassicism

No single artist started Neoclassicism, but the German scholar Johann Joachim Winckelmann and the painter Anton Raphael Mengs, both in Rome, did much to shape it. Tate credits Winckelmann's influential history of ancient art, published in 1764, with an intense flourishing of classicism, and the National Gallery in London says Winckelmann's influence helped form Mengs's Neoclassical style. In France, Jacques-Louis David, trained by the classicizing painter Vien, became the leading painter of the movement, the National Gallery says.

Sources: Tate: Neoclassicism · National Gallery: Anton Raphael Mengs · National Gallery: Jacques-Louis David

Neoclassicism started as a turn away from the decorative Rococo toward the serious, ordered art of antiquity, fed by new archaeological discoveries. The Getty's art vocabulary calls it a reaction to Rococo opulence, inspired by finds in the Mediterranean, and Tate links it to the discovery of the Roman ruins of Pompeii and to Winckelmann's history of ancient art. The National Gallery in London adds that a renewed emphasis on the public, teaching function of art, both inside and outside the academies, was an important factor.

Sources: Getty AAT: Neoclassical · Tate: Neoclassicism · National Gallery: Neoclassicism (glossary)

Rococo is light, playful and decorative; Neoclassicism, which replaced it in the late 1700s, is sober, linear and serious. Tate describes Rococo as a light, sensuous, intensely decorative French style of short curves and scrolls, seen in Boucher, Fragonard and Watteau, while the Getty's art vocabulary says Rococo was superseded by the Classical Revival in the late 18th century and describes Neoclassical works as linear, symmetrical and even severe. The National Gallery in London notes that the name Rococo was first used, as an insult, by the Neoclassicists themselves.

Sources: Tate: Rococo · Getty AAT: Rococo · Getty AAT: Neoclassical · National Gallery: Rococo (glossary)

The leading Neoclassical painters are Jacques-Louis David and Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres in France, with Anton Raphael Mengs and Angelica Kauffmann, and among sculptors Antonio Canova. The National Gallery in London calls David the leading painter in France of the Neoclassical movement and describes Ingres, his pupil, as the defender of a rigid classicism. In Britain, Tate names the paintings of Joshua Reynolds, Benjamin West and James Barry and the sculpture of John Flaxman. Canova's marble Three Graces, carved in Rome in 1814–1817 for the Duke of Bedford, belongs to the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

Sources: National Gallery: Jacques-Louis David · National Gallery: Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres · National Gallery: Anton Raphael Mengs · Tate: Neoclassicism · Victoria and Albert Museum: Canova, The Three Graces

A classic example of Neoclassical art is Jacques-Louis David's The Oath of the Horatii of 1784. Three brothers in Roman armor swear an oath on swords held up by their father, under plain stone arches, while the women of the family grieve. Louis XVI commissioned it; David painted it in Rome and showed it at the Salon of 1785, and the National Gallery in London says paintings like it made him famous. The Louvre hangs it in its Neoclassicism gallery, the Salle Daru.

Sources: Louvre Museum · National Gallery: Jacques-Louis David

In France, Neoclassicism was closely tied to the Revolution and to Napoleon, above all through Jacques-Louis David. The National Gallery in London says David took an active part in the Revolution of 1789, was elected a deputy and helped abolish the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture, and that his successive images of Napoleon as general, consul and emperor helped to glorify the French leader; from the Revolution to Napoleon's fall, David and his studio had a major influence on French art. His Death of Marat shows a fellow deputy murdered by Charlotte Corday in July 1793.

Sources: National Gallery: Jacques-Louis David

Neoclassical portraits are calm, precisely painted likenesses, and some sitters are posed like figures from ancient art. The National Gallery in London says Ingres took Madame Moitessier's pose from a Roman wall painting found at Herculaneum, showing the goddess of Arcadia, and that he painted her jewels with the smoothness and brilliance of enamel. David portrayed the chemist Antoine Lavoisier and his wife in 1788, and Gérard painted the diplomat Talleyrand in 1808; both pictures are in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Sources: National Gallery: Ingres, Madame Moitessier · Metropolitan Museum of Art · Metropolitan Museum of Art

Many are in the Louvre in Paris, which hangs David's The Oath of the Horatii, The Intervention of the Sabine Women and The Coronation of Napoleon, Ingres's Grande Odalisque and Girodet's The Entombment of Atala in its Neoclassicism gallery, the Salle Daru. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has David's The Death of Socrates and his portrait of the Lavoisiers, and Labille-Guiard's Self-Portrait with Two Pupils. David's The Death of Marat is in the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium in Brussels, and Ingres's The Source is on loan from the Louvre to the Musée d'Orsay.

Sources: Louvre Museum · Louvre Museum · Louvre Museum · Louvre Museum · Louvre Museum · Metropolitan Museum of Art · Metropolitan Museum of Art · Metropolitan Museum of Art · Metropolitan Museum of Art · Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium (French) · Louvre Museum

Yes. Every painter named on this page died by 1889, so their paintings are in the public domain in the United States and in countries where copyright ends 70 years after the artist's death. You can download them free and use them for anything, including commercial projects. A few countries have their own rules on photographs of artworks, so check them if you publish outside the U.S.

Sources: Cornell University Library: Copyright Term and the Public Domain