French Painting of Napoleon's Empire and Beyond

French Painting of Napoleon's Empire and Beyond

This course takes a look at the long arc of the nineteenth century in France and the rise of new distinctive styles of painting and other artworks. We will see how Neoclassicism, Romanticism, and Orientalism reflected the ambitions, achievements, and imagination of Napoleon's Empire and how these styles adapted in service to the changing political landscape to follow: the Bourbon Restoration, Revolution, and the foundation of the French Republic. From David and Ingres to Gericault and Courbet, we will chart the changing concepts of what accepted paintings could depict and how they could function for different governments and social classes; in this course, we will see how iconography in painting empowered an emperor and the common peasant in the emerging French identity of this decisive century. From the late seventeenth through the turn of the nineteenth century in France, we see a varied arc of styles reflect the turbulent political and social history of the era. France in the nineteenth century underwent great transformations in its political, social, and cultural histories; the rise of the empire of Napoléon Bonaparte, an archetypically ambitious Sicilian general who- for a time- realized his dream of a revived Roman Empire for a France in which he was Caesar. Hand-in-hand with his ambitions of conquest came a new injection of Neoclassicism in a marked Imperial Style which differed in motive and form from its predecessors from the Neoclassical style, derived from French academic Classicism, heralded by the tastemakers of Europe as the one best suited for channeling a sentiment of the noble and eternal. However, Napoleon’s empire on the nineteenth-century European stage unfolded in art as the marriage of this very canonical, we might say ritualistic impulse to visually evoke the Roman Empire while at the same time to distinguish Napoleon’s range as very different from the pomp of the deposed French Monarchy, with their own long-engrained traditions of Classical pomp. The result is its own chapter of the Neoclassical style of both French painting and sculpture.

Neoclassicism, Romanticism, Orientalism, and Realism in the Nineteenth Century

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What you will learn

• Students will learn the key developments, vocabulary terms, and works of art which are associated with developments in nineteenth-century French Painting.
• Students will be able to recognize major French artists and artworks.
• Students will gain an appreciation of the themes that defined French painting in the Napoleonic era.

Rating: 5

Level: All Levels

Duration: 1 hour

Instructor: Dr. Lily Filson