Louis Philippe style
The style of architecture and design under King Louis Philippe I was a more eclectic development of French neoclassicism, incorporating elements of neo-Gothic and other styles. It was the first French decorative style imposed not by royalty, but by the tastes of the growing French upper class. In painting, neoclassicism and romanticism contended to become the dominant style. In literature and music, France had a golden age, as the home of Frédéric Chopin, Franz Liszt, Victor Hugo, Honoré de Balzac, and other major poets and artists.
Much of the style was taken from the personality of the King himself. Unlike his Bourbon predecessors, he wore business dress, not formal robes, he lived in Paris, and he shunned ceremonies; he carried his own umbrella, and imposed no official styles.
Louis Philippe furniture had the same types and forms as the earlier French Restoration style, but with less decoration; comfort was the primary consideration. The Louis Philippe commode, with a marble top and a marquetry covering, was a popular example of the style.
Architecture
The style of public buildings under Louis-Philippe was determined by the Académie des Beaux-Arts, or Academy of Fine Arts, whose Perpetual Secretary from 1816 to 1839 was Quatremère de Quincy, a confirmed neoclassicist. The architectural style of public buildings and monuments was intended to associate Paris with the virtues and glories of ancient Greece and Rome, as it had been under Louis XIV, Napoleon and the Restoration. Under Louis Philippe, the monuments begun by Napoleon, including the Arc de Triomphe were completed. New monuments, such as the Luxor Obelisk in the Place de la Concorde and the July Column in Place de la Bastille were purely classical. The July Column was inaugurated on 28 July 1840, on the anniversary of the July Revolution, and dedicated to those killed during the uprising. Following the return to Paris of the ashes of Napoleon from Saint Helena in 1840, they were placed with great ceremony in a tomb designed by Louis Visconti beneath the church of Les Invalides.The reign of Louis-Philippe also saw the beginning of a movement to preserve and restore some of the earliest landmarks of Paris, inspired in large part by Victor Hugo's hugely successful novel The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, published in 1831. The leading figure of the restoration movement was Prosper Mérimée, named by Louis-Philippe as the Inspector-General of Historic Monuments. The Commission of Public Monuments was created in 1837, and in 1842, Mérimée began compiling the first official list of classified historical monuments, now known as the Base Mérimée.
The first structure to be restored was the nave of the church of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, the oldest in the city. Work also began in 1843 on the cathedral of Notre-Dame, which had been badly damaged during the Revolution, and stripped of the statues on its façade. Much of the work was directed by the architect and historian Viollet-le-Duc, who sometimes, as he admitted, was guided by his own scholarship of the "spirit" of Medieval architecture, rather strict historical accuracy. The other major restoration projects were Sainte-Chapelle and the Hôtel de Ville, dating to the 17th century; the old buildings which pressed up against the back of the Hôtel de Ville were cleared away; two new wings were added, the interiors were lavishly redecorated, and the ceilings and walls of the large ceremonial salons were painted with murals by Eugène Delacroix. Unfortunately, all the interiors were burned in 1871 by the Paris Commune.
The Beaux-Arts style
During the same period, a small revolution was taking place at the École des Beaux-Arts, led by four young architects; Joseph-Louis Duc, Félix Duban, Henri Labrouste and Léon Vaudoyer, who had first studied Roman and Greek architecture at the French Academy in Rome, then in the 1820s began the systematic study of other historic architectural styles including French architecture of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. They instituted teaching about a variety of architectural styles at the École des Beaux-Arts, and installed fragments of Renaissance and Medieval buildings in the courtyard of the school so students could draw and copy them. Each of them also designed new non-classical buildings in Paris inspired by a variety of different historic styles; Labrouste built the Sainte-Geneviève Library ; Duc designed the new Palais de Justice and Court of Cassation on the Île-de-la-Cité ; Vaudroyer designed the Conservatoire national des arts et métiers, and Duban designed the new buildings of the École des Beaux-Arts. Together, these buildings, drawing upon Renaissance, Gothic, Romanesque and other non-classical styles, broke the monopoly of Neoclassical architecture in Paris.Furniture
Finely-crafted inlaid furniture in the traditional fashion continued to be made in Paris by craftsmen such as Georges-Alphonse Jacob-Desmalter, the grandson of Georges Jacob, the royal cabinet maker for Louis XVI. He designed and made new furniture for the Tuileries Palace when it became the new residence of Louis Philippe in the 1830s, including a cabinet for the concert room decorated with an incrustation of ebony, red seashell and gilded bronze sculptural decoration.During the reign of Louis Philippe, forms of furniture changed little from the French Restoration period; comfort became a greater priority. Furniture became darker and heavier. The forms of chairs became rounded, with curving legs, and the backs of armchairs curved slightly in inward. In the gondola armchairs and chairs, the curved back and arms curved around and enfolded the person sitting. The Voltaire armchair had a high slightly curving back, padded armrests, and short legs.
The Louis Philippe commode was solid and heavy, and had a marble top and a front covered with a thin layer of light wood, often with an inlay of designs of dark wood, usually rosewood or mahogany, in patterns of oak leaves, palmettes, or other floral or vegetal decoration. Over the course of the period, the coloring was reversed; the darker woods were used more commonly to cover the furniture, with lighter woods like sycamore, holly and lemon wood used for inlays.
Tables were usually round or oval, often mounted on a pedestal, with cut-off or slanting corners. A variety of small tables became popular: writing tables, work tables, and the coiffeuse, or dressing table, equipped with an oval mirror. The legs of these tables were often in the shape of an S or of a lyre.
Sculpture
The most prominent sculptor of the Louis Philippe style was the Swiss-born James Pradier, who made one of the most important monumental works of the period, a group of statues of The Victories that surround the tomb of Napoleon Bonaparte. He also made other neoclassical works that often approached eroticism and romanticism. Gustave Flaubert wrote of him: "This is a great artist, a true Greek, the most antique of all the moderns; a man who is distracted by nothing, not by politics, nor socialism, and who, like a true workman, sleeves rolled up, is there to do his task morning til night with the will to do well and the love of his art." He was largely forgotten after the Louis Philippe period.Another notable sculptor from the older generation was David d'Angers who had studied with Jacques-Louis David. He worked largely in an expressive neoclassical style, illustrated in his statue of Philopoemen hurt, now in the Louvre.
Other sculptors with more enduring fame were François Rude, who made his celebrated La Marseillaise sculpture, a ten-meter high bas-relief for the Arc de Triomphe, a project begun by Napoleon and completed by Louis Philippe. Rude also made the romantic Napoleon awakening to immortality in 1845–47. This illustrated popular movement to restore the reputation of Napoleon and the revolutionary spirit, which had been suppressed under the Restoration, but which reappeared with the return of the ashes of Napoleon to France under Louis Philippe. The Napoleonic spirit emerged triumphant in the 1848 Revolution, and the election of Louis Napoleon as the first President of France.
Painting
The two most important painters of the Louis Philippe period, Eugène Delacroix and Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres were completely opposite in style, philosophy and temperament; Delacroix, the champion of romanticism, painted his celebrated Liberty Leading the People in 1830, shortly after the 1830 revolution that brought Louis Philippe to power, personifying the figure of Liberté as a bare-breasted classical goddess in the baroque style. The painting was acquired by the government of Louis Philippe for the Luxembourg Palace, but was soon returned to the painter because of its controversial political message, and was not shown again in public again until 1855, under Louis Napoleon. Thereafter it entered the collection of the Louvre.Ingres was the champion of the French neoclassical style, and in addition the master of the portrait. However, his Martyrdom of Saint-Symphorien in 1834 was very badly received by French critics, who preferred Delacroix, and he departed Paris in disgust to become director of the French Academy in Rome, where he remained until 1841. In Rome he painted the first of his Odalisque paintings, scenes of slaves in Turkish baths.
From 1833 onwards, Delacroix received major commissions to decorate government buildings in Paris. In 1833 he began work for the Salon du Roi in the Chambre des Députés, Palais Bourbon, which was not completed until 1837, For the next ten years he painted in both the Library at the Palais Bourbon and the Library at the Palais du Luxembourg. In 1843 he decorated the Church of Saint-Denys-du-Saint-Sacrement with a large Pietà.
None of the other painters of the Louis Philippe era had the ability or status of Ingres or Delacroix, but they did have great ambitions. They included Paul Delaroche, a classicist in the Ingres tradition, who painted ceiling murals for the redecoration of Louvre in 1831, and for the murals of the hemicycle of the École des Beaux Arts in 1837, which included the sixty-six most famous painters since antiquity. He was considered the dean of historical paintings, specializing in executions and martyrdoms.
Another notable painter of the period was Thomas Couture, a student of Antoine-Jean Gros, a muralist in the style called "Theatrical Romanticism". He received a commission for an eight-meter long painting for the Luxembourg Palace, titled "The Romans in their decadence". The finished painting borrowed from the old masters, the classicists, and the romantics, crowding dozens of figures into a single canvas depicting Roman decadence.