WHAT IS NEOCLASSICAL ART

Neoclassical Art is a severe and unemotional form of art harkening back to the grandeur of ancient
Greece and Rome. Its rigidity was a reaction to the overbred Rococo style and the emotional charged
Baroque style. The rise of Neoclassical Art was part of a general revival of interest in classical thought,
which was of some importance in the American and French revolutions.

Important Neoclassicists include the architects Robert Smirke and Robert Adam, the sculptors Antonio
Canova,Jean-Antoine Houdon and Bertel Thorvaldsen, and painters J.A.D. Ingres, Jacques-Louis David
and Anton Raphael Mengs.

Around 1800, Romanticism emerged as a reaction against Neoclassicism. It did not really replace the
Neoclassical style so much as act as a counterbalancing influence, and many artists were influenced by
both styles to a certain degree.

Neoclassical Art was also a primary influence on 19th-century Academic Art

Chronological Listing of Neoclassical Artists

Use ctrl-F (PC) or command-F (Mac) to search for a name

Jean-Francois de Troy 1679-1752 French Painter

Giovanni Paolo Pannini 1691-1765 Italian Painter

Jean Restout 1692-1768 French Painter

Louis-Joseph Le Lorrain 1715-1759 French Painter

Joseph Marie Vien 1716-1809 French Painter

Giovanni Battista Piranesi 1720-1778 Italian Engraver

Gavin Hamilton 1723-1798 Scottish Painter

Martin Knoller 1725-1804 Austrian Painter

Louis Jean Francois Lagrenee 1725-1805 French Painter

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, French Artist

Portrait of Charles Marcotte

EditWatch this pageRead in another language

Ingres, 1810, 93.7 x 69.4 cm. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
Portrait of Charles Marcotte (also known as Marcotte d'Argenteuil) is an 1810 oil on canvas painting by
the French Neoclassical artist Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, completed during the artists first stay in
Rome. Charles Marie Jean Baptiste Marcotte (1773-1864) was a long term friend, loyal supporter and
adviser to Ingres, and commissioned a number of portraits of his family and friends, as well as works
such as Odalisque with Slave (1839). He was 23 years in age when the portrait was painted, and serving
as inspector general for Waters and Forests in Napoleonic Rome.[1]

Although handsome, and possessing strong bone structure, he is portrayed as dour and serious, dressed
in an imposing military uniform, and given a stern facial expression, with tightly pursed lips, which are
turned down at the corners. A number of art historians have noted how his stiffness resemble Ingres'
own early self-portraits, particularly that of 1804.[2]

Marcotte stands against a plain grey-green background, leaning against a table draped with a red cloth.
[3] His stiff, starched white and yellow neck collar appears tight and restrictive.[1] He wears a blue carrick
with a cape and velvet collar, over a white shirt and yellow waistcoat. Affectionately, his hair appears
ruffled, which somewhat breaks the overall grim and morose tone.[3] Special attention is given to his
claw-like right hand, with its long sinuous fingers, the shape of which is echoed by the tassels protruding
from the scroll beside him.[1]

Marcotte commissioned the portrait as a gift to his mother.[3] He did not like the final painting, finding it
too stern, a fact Ingres asked him to keep to himself.[2] It remained in his possession until his death in
1864, after which it passed to his son Joseph Marcotte, and then to his widow, and to his daughter
Élisabeth Pougin de la Maisonneuve until 1935. It was acquired by Samuel H. Kress in 1949, and gifted to
the National Gallery of Art in 1952.[4]

Ingres signed and dated the painting on the lower right, over the red cloth.

Sources

Rosenblum, Robert. Ingres. London: Harry N. Abrams, 1990. ISBN 978-0-300-08653-9

Conisbee, Philip. Portraits by Ingres: Image of an Epoch. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1999.
ISBN 978-0-300-08653-9

External links

NGA catalogue entry