The fight that became the academy
Ingres did not carry the cult of line into the nineteenth century unopposed. The other half of the era grew up directly against him, and the quarrel between them became the spine of the whole period. On one side stood the Ingristes, Ingres’s camp, who held that drawing was the foundation of all good painting. On the other stood the colorists, led by the young Romantic Eugène Delacroix, who held that color and emotion and movement were the living heart of a picture and that Ingres’s cool perfect line was a corpse. It was an old fight in fresh clothes: a century and a half earlier French painters had split exactly this way over the merits of drawing versus color, and now Ingres and Delacroix were fighting it again across the Salon, line against color, calm against passion, the antique against the storm.
That opposing camp was Romanticism, Neoclassicism’s sibling and opposite, which grew up inside the same era answering reason with feeling, line with color, the calm Greek with the shipwreck and the firing squad. The two did not take turns politely. They overlapped and snarled at each other for decades, which is why this stretch of European painting is best understood not as one style following another but as a single argument, Reason against Feeling, carried on by people who genuinely could not stand each other’s work.
The storm rises inside the temple
The tidy version of the story is that Romanticism attacked Neoclassicism from the outside. It is half true. The other half is that Romanticism grew up inside David’s own studio, in the work of his most celebrated pupil. Antoine-Jean Gros (1771–1835) kept everything David had drilled into him, the monumental scale, the grand history-painting ambition, the public subject, and poured into it exactly what David had drained out: vivid color, raw feeling, the horror of war. The civic format stayed; the cool blood ran hot.
His Bonaparte Visiting the Plague Victims of Jaffa (1804) takes a Davidian machine and fills it with sickness and dread. In a plague hospital on the Syrian coast, Napoleon stands bare-handed among the dying and reaches out to touch the swollen sore on a stricken soldier’s body. Look closely at what the picture is doing, because the honest account matters. The visit was real; Napoleon did go to the plague hospital at Jaffa in 1799. The touch is the construction. The image deliberately borrows the old legend of the royal touch (the belief that a true king could heal disease with his bare hand), and it was made to bury a darker rumor, that Napoleon had ordered plague-stricken soldiers dosed with fatal opium so they would not slow his retreat. Gros recasts a possible murderer as a healer-king. The propaganda lives in that outstretched hand, painted with a Romantic intensity a full generation before Romanticism had a name.
Four years later Napoleon on the Battlefield of Eylau (1808) drops even the flattery and shows the field the morning after the slaughter, a frozen plain of corpses and begging wounded with the Emperor riding numbly through the wreckage. That unflinching horror is the Romantic core planted inside a government commission, and Gros’s pupils carried it forward: the young men who would build Romanticism, Géricault and Delacroix among them, learned the grand scale and the high feeling from him. Gros himself never made his peace with the movement he had helped father. When the critics turned on his late return to cold classical subjects, he drowned himself in 1835. He had proved that the storm could rise from inside the temple, that the rebellion against the severe style was partly bred by the severe style itself.
The wall every later rebel pushed against
Whatever the colorists thought of it, Neoclassicism won the long argument in one decisive way: it became the rulebook. David’s and Ingres’s drawing-first discipline (master the contour, study the antique, finish the surface, choose a serious subject) hardened into the academy (the official art establishment, in France the Académie with its school and its Salon, in Britain the Royal Academy, the system that trained the artists and controlled what the public got to see) and stayed the official training of European painting for the rest of the nineteenth century. To learn to paint was, for generations, to learn to draw the way David drew. Which means that every later revolt in art defined itself against these rules. When the Realists insisted on painting their own grubby century instead of antiquity, when the Impressionists dissolved the firm contour into flecks of bright color, when the whole avant-garde that followed tore up the academy’s requirements one by one, they were all, in their different ways, pushing against the wall Neoclassicism built. A movement that worshipped the rules of the ancient past ended up supplying the modern rules that everyone after would need to break.
One last twist sits in the name. The painters never called themselves Neoclassical. They spoke of “the true style” or “the correct style” or, in France, of le goût grec, the Greek taste. The word Neoclassicism was pinned on the movement much later, commonly dated to the 1880s, and it began life as an insult, a way of calling David’s school “pseudo-classical,” warmed-over antiquity, the real thing’s pale copy. The label that now sits respectably over a whole room of the Louvre started as a sneer.
Neoclassicism is the moment European painting decided art should be serious again: a school for virtue drawn from the Greeks and Romans, hard line doing the work, a Rococo it found pretty and empty left behind. It found its creed in a scholar and its body in David, and then history grabbed it and made the same stripped, sculptural style the official art of a Revolution and an Empire. Its drawing-first rules became the academy, and the academy became the thing every restless painter of the next hundred years was born to fight.