Neoclassical architecture and sculpture in France

Architectural influences
Seventeenth-century France

defies Italian Baroque,

says 'yes' to classical style.

The Rococo period

saw no enthusiasm.

The French stuck with classical.

Late eighteenth-century France.

New classicism

imported from Italy.

Romanticism

France takes longer to adopt.

Neoclassical architects
French eighteenth century
architects designed
neoclassical.
They represented
tradition and not.

Yes. Ah, tradition!
Jacques-Germain Soufflots:
the Church of Saint-Geneviève.
Roman-, French-, and English-styled
(Baroque and Palladian).
Porticos and domes.
A Greek cross floor plan.

But classicism
didn't hold on to the past.
There were vast differences
with the other branch.
This type aspired
to Enlightenment,
a utopia.
Austerity found
in Claude-Nicolas Ledoux's
residential court
for King Louis (the) XV
and his mistress du Barry.

Ledoux also made
geometric city plans
that were never realized
in Chaux in Southeastern France.
Ladoux detested
conspicuous consumption.
He opted for plain
egalitarian designs.

Étienne-Louis Boullée
helped the human race.
He strove to be poetic.
He chased the sublime
Edmund Burke described.
Boullée dreamed space.
Light pored through small holes
imitating shining stars.

Sculpture
Jean-Antoine Houdon
studied with Pigalle
neoclassical sculpture.
Houdon won the Prix de Rome
and studied in Italy.
Busts of people was his art
and full-bodied people too –
Benjamin Franklin,
George Washington too.
He held thirteen rods
in relaxed contrapposto.

 Work consulted: 
Stokstad, Marilyn. Art History. 1995. New York: revised ed., Harry N. Abrams, Inc., and Prentice Hall, Inc., 1999, p. 955-7.