Artists and critics believed that it should once again serve the nation and be good for the people, just as it had for the ancient Greeks and Romans. Classical art had depicted serious subjects in a serious way, and so late eighteenth century artists and architects deliberately began imitating Roman and Greek art" (Buser 1995)
The rococo itself was a reaction against the more formal baroque. "It was a style of high fashion and had few popular forms" (Kitson 1997) Rococo was playful, although the term was initially used in a pejorative fashion
When neoclassical works depicted women, in contrast, they tended to be idealized representations of freedom, as in the case of Marianne in the symbolic, bare-breasted depiction of Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People (1830). "It shows the allegorical figure of Liberty as a half-draped woman wearing the traditional Phrygian cap of liberty and holding a gun in one hand and the tricolor in the other" (Pioch 2002)
In this painting, Chardin provides a scene of a simple room in which a mother and her small daughters are about eat supper. The mood of this painting is highlighted by "quiet attention with hushed lighting, mellow colors and still life kitchen accessories, all placed within a humble domestic atmosphere" (Andersen, 1969, p
Many so-called enlightened monarchs made it possible for men like Voltaire to attack old European systems and call for limitations related to the privileges of the monarchy, the aristocracy and the clergy. The period between the death of King Louis XIV of France in 1715 and the outbreak of the American Revolution in 1775 served as a time of great social change in most of Europe and the ruling aristocracies, obviously fully aware of their decreasing importance in society, "gradually abandoned their societal positions in favor of men belonging to the "Third Estate," being the increasingly wealthy and influential middle class" (Conisbee, 2007, p
Another painting from a later period of the Rococo is known as the Return of the Prodigal Son (1777 to 1778), rendered by Jean Baptiste Greuze (1725 to 1805), a painter who became widely popular with the French middle classes and whose artistic approach to genre painting bordered on pure sentimentality. In this painting, Greuze "expresses perfectly the transition of taste from the Rococo to nineteenth-century Romanticism which is sometimes referred to as the "Age of Sensibility" (Smith & Cheal, 2003, p
Most assuredly, the greatest painter most closely linked to Neoclassicism and regarded as the father of neoclassical artistic expression in painting is Jacques Louis David (1748 to 1825) who "rebelled against the Rococo as an artificial taste and exalted classical art as the imitation of nature in her most beautiful and perfect form." David's artistic doctrine of the superiority of classical art was based upon the idea that art must "contribute forcefully to the education of the public and must at all times reflect the social conscience of a nation in the form of nationalistic propaganda" (Thompson, 1988, p
Compared to paintings rendered during the early years of the Baroque, those done during the Rococo period exhibited a relatively new type of artistic expression known as genre painting. Basically speaking, genre painting, as opposed to painting styles, may include still life, landscapes, seascapes and portraits, but during the Rococo period, genre painting came to be understood as "paintings which illustrate common, everyday activities of common men and women and at times royalty or the nobility" (Walker, 1994, p