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(b Copenhagen, Sept 11, 1743; d Frederiksdal, Copenhagen, June 4, 1809).

Danish painter, designer and architect. His paintings reveal both Neo-classical and Romantic interests and include history paintings as well as literary and mythological works. The variety of his subject-matter reflects his wide learning, a feature further evidenced by the broad range of his creative output. In addition to painting, he produced decorative work, sculpture and furniture designs, as well as being engaged as an architect. Successfully combining both intellectual and imaginative powers, he came to be fully appreciated only in the 1980s.

He studied at the Kongelige Danske Kunstakademi in Copenhagen (1764–72), and in 1767 he assisted Johan Edvard Mandelberg (1730–86) in painting the domed hall of the Fredensborg Slot with scenes from the Homeric epic the Iliad. In 1772 he was granted a five-year travelling scholarship from the Kunstakademi to study in Rome. During his Roman sojourn he extensively copied works of art from the period of antiquity up to that of the Carracci family. His friendships with the Danish painter Jens Juel, the Swedish sculptor Johan Tobias Sergel and the Swiss painter Johann Heinrich Fuseli placed him among artists who were in the mainstream of a widespread upheaval in European art. In these years Abildgaard developed both Neo-classical and Romantic tastes; his masterpiece of the period is ...

(b Puławy, June 1756; d Florence, Feb 8, 1841).

Polish architect and writer, also active in Italy. He probably studied in Rome in the late 1770s and returned to Italy in 1785–6 under the aegis of Stanisław Kostka Potocki, a collector and amateur architect with whom he collaborated throughout his life. In 1786 Aigner and Potocki refronted the church of St Anna, Warsaw, using a giant composite order on high pedestals. The political turmoil of the 1790s disrupted Aigner’s career, but during his second phase of creativity (1797–1816) he won fame through his work on the great estate of the Czartoryski family at Puławy, on the Vistula west of Lublin, the most important centre of cultural life in Poland during the Enlightenment. Aigner had already erected the Marynka Palace there in 1790, a variation on the Petit Trianon at Versailles, France, and from 1798 he began to add ornamental buildings to go with the new Picturesque layout of the Puławy gardens: a Chinese pavilion, a Gothick house and a peripheral Temple of the Sibyl with a shallow dome. In ...

(b Paris, July 9, 1764; d Paris, Jan 22, 1846).

French architect, painter, engraver, and teacher. Louis-Pierre Baltard was a pupil of Antoine-François Peyre and began working with Richard Mique in 1784 on the design of the garden of the Petit Trianon. In 1788 he left for Italy, where he painted, drew, and engraved as well as studying antique monuments; he also met Percier and Fontaine there. He was in France again in 1791, where he presented himself primarily as a painter (his début at the Salon was in 1791) and held the position of scenery designer at the Opéra from 1792. In 1793 he became a military engineer and presented various fortification plans. He subsequently obtained a post as professor of architecture when the Ecole Polytechnique de Paris was created in 1796. Under the Consulate, he was the engraver for the publication documenting the Egyptian expedition. Baltard’s architectural career really began under the first Empire, a period when he became the architect of the Panthéon and subsequently of prisons, food depots, and markets in Paris. In ...

(b Gotha, Dec 27, 1725; d Vienna, March 23, 1806).

German sculptor, painter and architect. He was the son of a court gardener who worked first in Gotha and then in Württemberg. He was originally intended to become an architect; in 1747 Duke Charles-Eugene of Württemberg sent him to train in Paris where, under the influence of painters such as Charles-Joseph Natoire and François Boucher, he turned to painting. The eight-year period of study in Rome that followed prompted Beyer to devote himself to sculpture, as he was impressed by antique works of sculpture and was also influenced by his close contacts with Johann Joachim Winckelmann and his circle. He also served an apprenticeship with Filippo della Valle, one of the main representatives of the Neo-classical tendency in sculpture. In 1759 Beyer returned to Germany, to take part in the decoration of Charles-Eugene’s Neues Schloss in Stuttgart.

In Stuttgart Beyer made an important contribution to the founding and improvement of facilities for the training of artists, notably at the Akademie, and to manufacture in the field of arts and crafts, particularly at the ...

(Stanisław)

(bapt Warsaw, Dec 26, 1784; d Warsaw, March 31, 1832).

Polish painter and teacher. He studied for a short time under Jean-Baptiste Augustin in Paris between 1805 and 1808, returning later to Paris at the end of 1809 and remaining until the autumn of 1814 as a bursar of the Chamber of Public Education of the Duchy of Warsaw. He wished to study under Jacques-Louis David but was able to do so only on a part-time basis. After a brief period of study under Anne-Louis Girodet, he became a pupil of François Gérard in 1811. At this time Brodowski painted his first oil portraits, one of the best being his Self-portrait (1813; Warsaw, N. Mus.). He also started work on a large composition suggested by Gérard, Saul’s Anger at David (1812–19; Warsaw, N. Mus.), which was exhibited after his return to Warsaw at the first public fine arts exhibition in 1819, where it won first prize. The painting clearly shows the influence of David and Brodowski’s commitment to the strict canons of the French Empire style; it became a model for Neo-classical painting in Warsaw....

(b Florence, 1727; d London, Dec 14, 1785).

Italian painter, draughtsman and designer, active in England.

Cipriani trained in Florence under the direction of the Anglo-Florentine artist Ignazio Enrico Hugford; in his early works he was also influenced by the Baroque style of Anton Domenico Gabbiani. His first commissions, for the organ screen in S Maddalena dei Pazzi, Florence, and for two altarpieces in Pistoia (both now in S Bartolomeo), are undistinguished and tentative works that still show traces of the Baroque style. His modest Self-portrait (c. 1750; Florence, Uffizi) demonstrates Cipriani’s incipient ability as a draughtsman. In 1750 he went to Rome, where he came into contact with English artists on the Grand Tour. He became friendly with William Chambers and Joseph Wilton—proponents of a Neo-classical style of architecture and sculpture respectively. In 1755 Chambers and Wilton took him to London; he settled there, marrying an Englishwoman in 1761.

In London, Cipriani was immediately in demand as one of the first exponents of a developing Neo-classical decorative style. He was an instructor with Wilton at the Duke of Richmond’s gallery in Whitehall and a member of the St Martin’s Lane Academy. He was a founder-member of the Royal Academy, where he exhibited pictures and drawings, primarily of Classical and religious subjects, between ...

(b Senlis, Dec 21, 1815; d Villiers-le-Bel, March 3, 1879).

French painter and teacher. A student of Antoine-Jean Gros in 1830–38 and Paul Delaroche in 1838–9, he demonstrated precocious ability in drawing and was expected to win the Prix de Rome. He tried at least six times between 1834 and 1839, but achieved only second prize in 1837 (entry untraced). Disgusted with the politics of the academic system, Couture withdrew and took an independent path. He later attacked the stultified curriculum of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and discouraged his own students from entering this institution. He first attained public notoriety at the Paris Salon with Young Venetians after an Orgy (1840; Montrouge, priv. col., see Boime, p. 85), the Prodigal Son (1841; Le Havre, Mus. B.-A.) and the Love of Gold (1844; Toulouse, Mus. Augustins). These early canvases are treated in a moralizing and anecdotal mode; the forms and compositional structures, like the debauched and corrupt protagonists, are sluggish and dull. Yet what made his work seem fresh to the Salon audience was his use of bright colour and surface texture derived from such painters as Alexandre-Gabriel Decamps and Eugène Delacroix, while his literary bent and methodical drawing demonstrated his mastery of academic tradition. The critics Théophile Gautier and Paul Mantz (...

(b Paris, Sept 18, 1760; d Thiais, Dec 31, 1834).

French architect, teacher and writer. He was one of the most influential teachers of his time, and his radically rationalist approach, which emphasized priority of function and economy of means, was expressed in analytical writings that remained popular into the 20th century. He studied under Pierre Panseron (fl 1736) and from 1776 in the office of Etienne-Louis Boullée. He also took courses with Julien-David Le Roy at the Académie d’Architecture and participated in competitions under the guidance of Jean-Rodolphe Perronet. He twice came second in the Prix de Rome: in 1779 for a museum and in 1780 for a school. During the 1780s he worked as a draughtsman for Boullée and for the engraver Jean-François Janinet. In 1788 construction began in the Rue du Faubourg-Poissonnière, Paris, of his Maison Lathuille, a building with Néo-Grec decoration but with a layout characterized by its extreme simplicity. About 1790 he executed a series of drawings entitled ...

(b York, July 6, 1755; d London, Dec 9, 1826).

English sculptor, designer and teacher. He was the most famous English Neo-classical sculptor of the late 18th century and the early 19th. He produced comparatively few statues and portrait busts but devoted himself to monumental sculpture and became noted for the piety and humanity of his church monuments. He also had an international reputation based on his outline illustrations to the works of Homer, Aeschylus and Dante, which led him to be described by Goethe as ‘the idol of all dilettanti’. More recently attention has focused on his models for pottery and silver, and he has emerged as an important pioneer in the development of industrial design.

Flaxman was the son of a plaster-cast maker employed by both Louis-François Roubiliac and Peter Scheemakers (ii), and at an early age he showed great promise as a sculptor, exhibiting at the Royal Academy in 1771–3. He had entered the Royal Academy Schools in ...

(b Alava, Spain, 1810; d Mexico City, 1872).

Spanish architect, painter, and teacher, active in Mexico. He graduated as an architect from the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, Madrid, but also worked in painting, sculpture, and pastel miniatures. In 1836 he worked in Paris under Henri Labrouste, and in 1838 he went to Mexico City, where he opened a school of drawing. As one of the outstanding architects in Mexico at the time, he was made an académico de mérito of the Academia de San Carlos and its director of architecture. His chief work was the Teatro de Santa Anna (1842–1844; later Teatro Nacional; destr. 1901), Mexico City, a neoclassical building that was for a long time the most costly in the city. The principal façade had a portico with four large Corinthian columns rising through two tories. He also rebuilt the dome (1845–1848) of the side chapel of the church of S Teresa la Antigua, Mexico City. His solution was a neoclassical dome supported by a double drum, producing interesting light effects in the interior. The windows of the upper drum, concealed by an incomplete vault rising from the lower one, illuminate paintings around the bottom of the dome. Few of his other works have survived....

(b Montauban, Aug 29, 1780; d Paris, Jan 14, 1867).

French painter. He was the last grand champion of the French classical tradition of history painting. He was traditionally presented as the opposing force to Delacroix in the early 19th-century confrontation of Neo-classicism and Romanticism, but subsequent assessment has shown the degree to which Ingres, like Neo-classicism, is a manifestation of the Romantic spirit permeating the age. The chronology of Ingres’s work is complicated by his obsessive perfectionism, which resulted in multiple versions of a subject and revisions of the original. For this reason, all works cited in this article are identified by catalogue raisonné number: Wildenstein (w) for paintings; Naef (n) for portrait drawings; and Delaborde (d) for history drawings.

His father, Jean-Marie-Joseph Ingres (1755–1814), a decorative painter and sculptor as well as an amateur musician, taught him the basics of drawing and also the violin. In accord with contemporary academic practice, Ingres devoted much of his attention to copying from his father’s collection of prints after such masters as Raphael, Titian, Correggio, Rubens, Watteau and Boucher; none of these copies survives. The earliest known drawings, some signed ...

(b ?Cork, c. 1732; d Dublin, Dec 1786).

Irish architect. He was, with Thomas Cooley, the most prominent architect in Dublin in the 1770s. His importance possibly derived less from his buildings than from his post as master of the Dublin Society’s School of Architectural Drawing, where from the early 1760s to his death he instructed many craftsmen and designers in architectural drawing and the rudiments of classical composition.

Ivory’s most important buildings are Kilcarty (c. 1770–80), Co. Meath, and the Bluecoat School (King’s Hospital; begun 1773) and Newcomen’s Bank (c. 1781), both in Dublin. His partly executed designs for the Bluecoat School in the British Library are among the most beautiful Irish architectural drawings of the 18th century. They reveal Ivory’s conservative, even old-fashioned approach, for here, as late as 1773, he proposed a Palladian composition enlivened with Baroque flourishes.

Never reluctant to repeat his designs, Ivory used the same basic layout in the Bluecoat drawings and at Kilcarty, a sophisticated and subtle farmhouse that he self-consciously refused to turn into a villa. The Bluecoat elevations reappear in flawless Neo-classical guise in Newcomen’s Bank, described by Maurice Craig as ‘the only building in Dublin which looks as though it might have been designed by one of the Adams’. Ivory was no innovator but a sensitive exponent of conservative taste. In the 1770s he was upstaged by Thomas Cooley and eclipsed after ...

(b Thessaloniki, 1811; d Athens, Oct 5, 1886).

Greek architect and teacher. He studied at the Accademia di Belle Arti, Rome (1826–36), and in 1833 he was awarded the first prize in the architectural competition for the design of the Università di Milano. In 1838, after two years in France, he returned to Greece to live in Athens. He exhibited his designs and projects there, among them the monument to the Heroes of the War of Independence of 1821 (unexecuted), for which he had won an award at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. After a period in Turkey (1839–43), he was appointed Director of the Royal School of Fine Arts in Athens in 1844 (later the National Technical University). He was promoted by the wealthiest and most influential of the Greek bourgeoisie, the expatriate merchants who financed most public projects. He contributed enormously to the development of the University and the establishment of Neo-classicism in Greece, both as an ideology and as a viable form of architecture. The austerity and rigour of the Greek version of Neo-classicism corresponded well with his attachment to the classical canon, which he used effectively to create an urban morphology of rhythmical volumes and regulatory grids, an orderly environment that would represent the freedom and progress of modern Greece....

(b Doetinchem, bapt Nov 16, 1738; d Osterholt, nr Kampen, bur Jan 11, 1796).

Dutch architect, teacher, stuccoist and sculptor. He moved to Amsterdam at a young age, possibly with the help of his uncles Hans Jacob Husly and Hendrik Husly (both fl c. 1730–70), who were stuccoists in that city, and he probably trained as a stuccoist in their studio. In 1758 he co-founded an art appreciation society and in 1765 the Amsterdam Academy of Drawing, which, in the absence of an academy of fine art in the city, played an important educational role during the Neo-classical period. He was a director of the academy, where he presented lectures, for example on the use of architecture in painting, which were later printed. He also taught architecture and organized the library. He probably travelled to Paris in 1768, where he is thought to have familiarized himself with contemporary French ideas on architecture. One of his earliest works is the Town Hall (1772...

(b Nieuwpoort, Jan 3, 1786; d Ghent, April 5, 1864).

Belgian architect. He was the son of a carpenter; from 1803 he trained at the Academie voor Schone Kunsten in Ghent, where he was awarded a first prize in 1808. He went to Paris, where he worked in the important studio of Charles Percier(-Bassant) and Pierre-François-Léonard Fontaine. Together with L. Renard, Tieleman-Frans Suys and others, he contributed to the Choix des plus célèbres maisons de plaisance de Rome et de ses environs (1809–12), with drawings by Fontaine and Percier. In 1811 he won the Prix de Rome but did not go to Italy for health reasons. The fall of the Empire brought him back to Belgium in 1815, and he was appointed City Architect and professor at the Academie voor Beeldende Kunsten in Antwerp. His entry for a competition in London to make a monument commemorating the Battle of Waterloo, and above all his design (1816) for the auditorium of Ghent University, instantly established his reputation. He returned to Ghent, where he held the post of City Architect from ...

(b Woodford, Essex, 1714; d London, Sept 27, 1788).

English architect and sculptor. His father Robert (1690–1742), a master mason and monumental sculptor with a successful business in and around the City of London, apprenticed him at the age of 18 to the sculptor Henry Cheere. On completion of the apprenticeship he was given ‘just money enough to travel on a plan of frugal study to Rome’, but his studies there were cut short by news of his father’s death. On his return home he found the family finances in disarray; nevertheless he took over his father’s yard and soon prospered, even though it was some time before the debts were paid off. His own reputation as a sculptor was sufficiently advanced by 1744 for Parliament to commission from him a monument to Capt. James Cornewall in Westminster Abbey, London. In the same year he won the commission for the carved pediment of the Mansion House, London (a building on which his ...

(b Rome, c. 1740; d Santiago de Chile, 1799).

Italian architect, active in Chile. He began his career in the office of Francesco Sabbatini, who at that time was working for the Spanish authorities in Naples. In 1759 Charles IV of Naples assumed the Spanish throne as Charles III (reg 1759–88) and took Sabbatini to Madrid as architect to the Crown, together with his best assistants, including Toesca. Toesca’s career in Madrid was pursued under Sabbatini’s shadow, but he came into his own when he was seconded to Chile in 1778 to rebuild Santiago Cathedral, burnt down in 1769. Reusing the existing foundations, Toesca produced a Neo-classical design, now obscured by late 19th-century additions. His major work was the mint in Santiago, the Real Casa de Moneda, now the executive residence. The plan is laid out around several courtyards behind a Neo-classical elevation that features a three-storey central block in three bays flanked by two-storey wings. The central block is articulated below by four sets of coupled columns of a giant order, to which coupled pilasters correspond on the third floor. In lieu of columns, the six-bay wings are marked off by clustered pilasters and surmounted by a heavy balustrade. The composition recalls Luigi Vanvitelli’s backdrop to the Piazza Dante, which was going up in Naples while Toesca was working on ...

(b Enguera, Valencia, 1757; d Mexico City, Dec 24, 1816).

Spanish architect, sculptor, and teacher, active in Mexico. He studied at the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de S Carlos, Valencia, at a time when Baroque forms were being rejected in Spain and Neo-classicism was being promoted. He was apprenticed to the sculptor José Puchol Rubio (d 1797), who also taught him extensively about architecture. In 1780 Tolsá moved to Madrid, where he studied under Juan Pascual de Mena and at the Real Academia de Bellas-Artes de S Fernando, where his subjects included painting. There he also designed several reliefs, including the Entry of the Catholic Kings into Granada (1784; Madrid, Real Acad. S Fernando). He was selected as an academician in 1789.

Following the endorsement of Juan Adán and Manuel Francisco Alvarez de la Peña, in 1790 Tolsá succeeded José Arias (c. 1743–88) as director of sculpture at the Real Academia de S Carlos de la Nueva España in Mexico City. He took with him a collection of plaster casts for sculptures, many books, and 154 quintals (7 tonnes) of plaster for the Academia. He arrived in ...

(b London, July 16, 1722; d London, Nov 25, 1803).

English sculptor. He was the son of William Wilton (d 1768), a plasterer who ran an extremely profitable factory making papier-mâché ornaments. He trained with Laurent Delvaux at Nivelles in Flanders and from 1744 under Jean-Baptiste Pigalle in Paris. In 1747 he travelled to Italy; three years later in Rome he was awarded the Jubilee gold medal by Benedict XIV. By 1751 he was in Florence, where he began to gain a considerable reputation for his copies of antique sculpture. The bald, undraped marble portrait of Dr Antonio Cocchi (1755; London, V&A) is the only surviving bust from life produced by Wilton during this Italian period. In 1755 he returned to England accompanied by the architect William Chambers, the sculptor G. B. Capezzuoli (fl 1755–82) and the painter Giovanni Battista Cipriani. Initially he set up his workshop at his father’s house in Charing Cross, London. His bust of ...