Allegory of the Arts

Joseph Marie Vien

1796 · Pen and black ink, brush and brown wash, over faint black chalk underdrawing · Drawings and Prints

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.

Artist

Joseph Marie Vien

Date

1796

Medium

Pen and black ink, brush and brown wash, over faint black chalk underdrawing

Department

Drawings and Prints

Credit line

Purchase, Guy Wildenstein and Stephen A. Geiger Gifts, 2008