Jacques-Louis David
Jacques-Louis David was born into a prosperous French family in Paris on 30 August 1748. When he was about nine his father was killed in a duel and his mother left him with his well-off architect uncles. They saw to it that he received an excellent education at the Collège des Quatre-Nations, University of Paris, but he was never a good student-- he had a facial tumor that impeded his speech, and he was always preoccupied with drawing. He covered his notebooks with drawings, and he once said, "I was always hiding behind the instructor's chair, drawing for the duration of the class". Soon, he desired to be a painter, but his uncles and mother wanted him to be an architect. He overcame the opposition, and went to learn from François Boucher (1703–1770), the leading painter of the time, who was also a distant relative. Boucher was a Rococo painter, but tastes were changing, and the fashion for Rococo was giving way to a more classical style. Boucher decided that instead of taking over David's tutelage, he would send David to his friend, Joseph-Marie Vien (1716–1809), a painter who embraced the classical reaction to Rococo. There, David attended the Royal Academy, based in what is now the Louvre.
Neoclassicism in France
The dominant figure in French neoclassical painting, even before the Revolution, was Jacques Louis David (1748-1825). He began as a classical and religious painter, an admirer of Jean-Baptiste Greuze, the history and genre painter. He was recommended to the Royal Academy of Fine Arts by a family friend, François Boucher, master of the rococo style. He won the prestigious Prix de Rome and went to study there in 1775. He discovered the treasures excavated from Pompeii and other ancient sites, and entirely changed his style. Beginning in 1784 he painted works based on stories from classical literature, including "Oath of the Horatii" (1781), a celebration of duty and sacrifice in Roman times. When the French Revolution began in 1789, David became an active participant in the most extreme wing, the Jacobins, He supported the dissolution of the Academy of Fine Arts, and designed sets for revolutionary pageants and ceremonies. His most famous picture of the period, "Marat Assassiné" (1793), adapted the facial expression and the limp arm of Christ in Michaelangelo's "Pieta" to depict the assassinated Jacobin leader, Jean Paul Marat. When the Jacobins fell in 1794, he was imprisoned twice for several months, but then resumed an active career as a portraitist and then as court painter for Napoleon Bonaparte. When Napoleon fell and the monarchy was restored, he went into exile in Belgium.
French painting was dominated for years by David and his pupils, including Antoine-Jean Gros (1771-1835), and later Jean-Auguste Dominique Ingres (1780-1867). The later neoclassical painters put aside the political messages and concentrated on idealized figures and ideas of beauty; they included François Gérard, who like David, made a famous portrait of Madame Récamier, much to the annoyance of David; Jean-Baptiste Regnault (1754-1829); Pierre-Paul Prud'hon (1758-1823); Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun (1755-1842) and Anne Louis Girodet-Trioson (1767-1824).
The most prominent French sculptor in the early neoclassical period was Étienne Maurice Falconet (1716-1791). whose work included the heroic statue of Peter the Great on horseback in Saint Petersburg, Russia (model made in 1770, but not cast until 1782). He was named professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Paris in 1766, and from 1757 onward he directed the modeling of small sculptures in porcelain at the Sèvres Porcelain manufactory. His work remained closer to the statues in full movement of the French baroque than the new, more serene style. In his later years he designed small ornamental sculptures of cast bronze such as the "Seated Girl" (1788), now in the Metropolitan Museum.