Joseph-Marie Vien

By the time Joseph-Marie Vien won the Prix de Rome in 1743, French painting still ran on the sweetness of the Rococo, its soft mythologies and decoration for aristocratic salons. In Rome he did something quieter. He drew from the antique fragments around him and from life, and brought home a plainer, cooler manner that pointed toward what would later be called Neoclassicism.

That turn mattered less for his own canvases than for the students he handed it to. As director of the French Academy in Rome from 1775, and then First Painter to the King, he taught a generation of painters, among them the young Jacques-Louis David, who would carry the new severe style into the heart of the Revolution. When David set out for Rome, it was in Vien's charge.

Vien lived long enough to see the court he served swept away. He was the last man ever to hold the old royal title of Premier peintre du Roi, keeping it until 1791, then made his peace with the new order. He died in Paris in 1809, past 90, having been made a senator and a count under Napoleon.