Allegory of the Arts
Joseph Marie Vien French
In his early career, Vien practiced a "Greek manner," grafting an antiquarian veneer onto his Rococo style. Many of his students, including Jacques Louis David, Pierre Peyron, Jean-Baptiste Regnault, and Joseph Benoît Suvée, would go on to develop a more severe form of Neoclassicism.
In 1789, he was named to the post of director of the Académie Royale, the powerful arts organization under the Bourbon monarchy. Following the Revolution, the institution was dissolved in 1793. In 1796, at age eighty, Vien was made a member of the paintings division of the newly formed Institut de France. In this highly finished drawing made the same year, allegorical figures representing the arts are grouped around a bust of Homer and guided by the example of the antique.
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