Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1970. / Typescript. Vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 226-238).

Pierre Paul Prud’hon (1758-1823) lived and worked as an artist during the last years of the French Monarchy, the Revolution, the Republic, the Empire and finally the Restoration. He mostly worked with allegory, setting him apart from other artists at the time, such as Jacques Louis David. While Prud’hon was a significant artist in his own time, he is only just being rehabilitated today. In this thesis I trace Prud’hon’s artistic career as an allegorical painter through the different governments, examining thematically his different types of allegories, from the moral to the political. In particular, the context of allegory is examined, including how Prud’hon approaches allegory and criticism and interpretation of his use of allegory. This examination of Prud’hon highlights what was so unusual about Prud’hon’s art – primarily his use, with reasonable success, of allegory. This alone makes it clear that he should be held in higher regard by today’s art historians.

Attempting to make sense of the oeuvre of Prud’hon in 1876, Edmond de Goncourt in his Catalogue Raisonné de Prud’hon contrasts Prud’hon’s paintings with the predominant art of David and his students. He describes Prud’hon as an isolated romantic artist, full of elegance, going against the virile masculine academic traditions of his day. Goncourt sees in Prud’hon the epitome of an erotic classicism, which he considers unique for his time. I seek to demonstrate that Prud’hon’s embrace of classicism reflects and propels a variety of contexts from the literary, aesthetic, philosophical, and cultural developments of his time. The significance of poignant upheaval and the political change from the ancien regime through the Revolution and the Empire had a considerable impact on the various moments examined in my dissertation. I use selected examples from his works and those of his contemporaries to serve as case studies to reveal key moments in the development of his oeuvre. Prud’hon’s oeuvre is vast, but my dissertation will highlight case studies from 1770-1815. I have analyzed central concepts of this period’s aesthetic and philosophical ideals, especially the philosophic treatises by French Enlightenment thinkers such as Rousseau and Diderot, and by classicists like Winckelmann and Quatremère de Quincy. Prud’hon’s transformations were also clearly impacted by the historical reality of the French Revolution and Empire.