# VIEN, Joseph-Marie [View the canonical artist record]() ## Artist - Lifespan: 1716–1809 - Profession: painter - School: French ## Biography French painter. A winner of the Prix de Rome, he was in Rome at a time \(1743-50\) that coincided with excavations at Herculaneum and Pompeii, and in his lifetime he gained a great reputation \(partly self-promoted\) as a pioneer of the Neoclassical style. He was enthusiastic for the ideas of Winckelmann, but his classicism was of a very superficial kind, consisting of prim and sentimentalized anecdote or allegory with pseudo-antique trappings \( The Cupid Seller, Château de Fontainebleau, 1763\). Nevertheless, he gauged the taste of the time well and had a career of exemplary success, becoming director of the French Academy in Rome \(1776\) and First Painter to the King \(1789\). He was made a senator by Napoleon after the Revolution, a count in 1808, and was buried in the Pantheon. David was his most important pupil. His son, Joseph-Marie the Younger \(1762-1848\), was also a painter, mainly of portraits. ## Related artworks - [Greek Maidens Adorning a Sleeping Cupid with Flowers]() - [La Marchande d'Amours]() - [Lover Crowning his Mistress]() - [Marcus Aurelius Distributing Bread to the People]() - [Portrait of the Architect Barthélemy Michel Hazan on Horseback in Mufti]() - [St Denis Preaching in Gaul]() - [The Sleeping Hermit]() - [Venus Showing Mars her Doves Making a Nest in his Helmet]() - [Venus, Wounded by Diomedes, Is Saved by Iris]() - [Women in Classical Dress Attending a Young Bride]() ## Attribution [Web Gallery of Art]()