La Grande Odalisque is an 1814 painting by French Neoclassical artist Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. La Grande Odalisque Analysis One of Ingres’s most famous paintings, La Grande Odalisque hints at an attraction toward Romanticism in the great Neoclassicist and drew harsh criticism because of the strange anatomy of its subject. What we see It shows an odalisque …
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Portrait of George Washington is a 1799 portrait painting by American Neoclassical artist Rembrandt Peale. Analysis of the Portrait of George Washington This 1846 oil on canvas portrait of George Washington was painted by American artist Rembrandt Peale who was a prominent portraitist who painted in the neoclassic style. Peale painted an original portrait of …
John Reinhard Weguelin was a British painter who emulated the style of Lawrence Alma-Tadema as can be seen in Lesbia from 1878. The lover of the ancient Roman poet Catullus is standing in a doorway while watching her sparrows feed. She is shown wearing translucent drapery which exhibits Weguelin’s treatment of the nude form. She …
William Blake Richmond was a renowned Neoclassical painter of the Victorian age in Britain who painted Hera in the House of Hephaistos around 1902. He paints an episode from Greek mythology here, as Hera, the queen of Olympus and wife of Zeus, is shown in the house of her son Hephaestus who was the god …
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Benjamin West was a self-taught Neoclassical painter in America. Here is his 1816 painting Benjamin Franklin Drawing Electricity from the Sky, the famous polymath and one of the founders of modern America, looks to the heavens in a dramatic scene of thunder and lightning with his eyes similarly alight with curiosity and inspiration. He is …
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John Reinhard Weguelin, a British Neoclassical painter, was known for his mythological and historical subjects mainly based on the ancient world which can be seen in his 1886 work The Obsequies of an Egyptian Cat. Here the scene is in ancient Egypt, where a woman makes a ritualistic preparation for the journey of the soul …
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John Reinhard Weguelin’s 1900 painting The Mermaid of Zennor is taken from a Cornish folk tale that tells the story of an ageless woman with a sweet singing voice who enchanted a local man of a similar talent to run away with her. She was spotted by local fishermen later in the form of a …
John Reinhard Weguelin paints in 1888 a funeral scene from Greek mythology in The Gardens of Adonis. We see the aftermath of the tragic death of Adonis, a man of such beauty that goddesses feuded over him. He was gored to death by a boar and died in the arms of Aphrodite. His blood mixed …
French Neoclassical artist Antoine-Jean Gros paints General Baston de Lariboisière and His Son Ferdinand in 1805, a year after Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo and the mood in France is generally a complex of remembrance and mourning. Here, Ferdinand is portrayed as a gallant and brave young officer of the Napoleonic army as he stands with …
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Here is an 1800 portrait of Christine Boyer by Antoine-Jean Gros, as a member of the then ascendant Bonaparte family. She was the wife of Lucien, Napoleon’s younger brother. She was to die later that year in childbirth. She is painted in somewhat of a dramatic, if not tragic, demeanor by the artist; her gaze …
Gainsborough Dupont’s subject, Henry Fiennes Pelham Clinton, the Earl of Lincoln, stands cross-legged with his right hand on his hip and an expression of stern authority in this Neoclassical work. He leans on a column’s pedestal on which are inscribed a crown and the initials of his status. Thus, the picture can be read as …
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In 1810 French artist Antoine-Jean Gros painted a portrait of General Claude Legrand who was a distinguished general of Napoleon. He was a veteran leader of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars and was to die of his wounds in 1815 at the River Berezina. In Gros’s portrait here the general is shown full-length out …
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Antoine-Jean Gros was commissioned by the boy’s father to paint this spirited piece Equestrian Portrait of Prince Boris Yusupov in 1809. Primarily known as an Academic painter of Napoleon, Gros never saw Russia and so paints an imaginary landscape here. The horse rears up energetically while the young prince manages the reins adeptly with his …
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Paul-Jacques-Aimé Baudry’s painting of Charlotte Corday can be seen as a riposte to Jacques-Louis David’s treatment of the same subject, the assassination of a wild and bloodthirsty leader of the French Revolution, Jean-Paul Marat. Corday, a royalist sympathizer, here awaits her arrest as Marat lies dying with his hand gripping his bath’s edge. The work …
Jacques-Louis David’s portrait of Anne-Marie-Louise Thélusson, Countess of Sorcy was painted in 1790 at the beginning of the French Revolution and David, a supporter of the revolution, paints his sitter in simple clothing wrapped in a cowl. This shows Madame Thélusson as a simple citizen despite her title, in a new world that was seeing …
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Melancholy is a painting of a female figure here slumped over in a depressive state by French painter Constance Marie Charpentier. Finished in 1801 at age 34, it is painted exquisitely and with classical decorum. The expressive melancholy in the face is true to life. The position of her figure in the picture also recalls …
The Death of Cleopatra is a highly finished scene at the border between classical composition and naturalistic style by French painter Jean-André Rixens (1846-1925). The composition painted early in his career in 1874 at age 28 is highly ordered, with a frieze-like arrangement of the figures parallel to the picture’s surface and lighting that focuses …
French painter Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres spent 20 years on and off painting Angelica saved by Ruggiero between 1819 and 1839. The story is based on the Italian epic poem Orlando Furioso by Ludovico Ariosto in 1516. Angelica saved by Ruggiero Analysis Here we see Ruggiero on a Hippogriff, a mythical creature half man half griffin saving …
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Napoleon Accepts the Surrender of Madrid, 4th December 1808 by French painter Antoine-Jean Gros shows the success of the French quashing the months-long Spanish revolt against Joseph Bonaparte’s rule, and the banishment of the British forces from the Iberian peninsula. Painted two years after the events took place and exhibited at the Salon of 1810 …
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Here French painter Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres paints Inès Moitessier, a woman of French high society. She turns to the viewer in a richly decorated room in a dark dress with a passive expression. This 1851 portrait is the first of two (the second being in the National Gallery in London) by Ingres of the wife of …
