Although this period was one of the most brilliant and productive in the history of European art, its achievements do not appear as the expression of a single religious or philosophical principle. No period seems so full of contradictions in its aims, its personalities and its modes of expression; these contradictions are at once apparent from a comparison between the work of David and Prud'hon, Turner and Constable or Delacroix and Ingres. In architecture a similar gulf appears between the supreme urbanity of Carlton House or Malmaison and the cyclopean fantasies of Boullée or Ledoux. Anomalies multiply as the period develops; in ten years Jacques-Louis David progressed from the role of official painter under the Convention to that of premier peintre de l'Empereur. Ingres, denounced at first as ‘Gothic’ and as a barbu, came to be regarded as the arch-priest of academic convention, while the erudite and aristocratic Delacroix became the pre-eminent exponent of colour, violence and exoticism.

At the opening of the period these complexities are not fully apparent. The outstanding artistic event of the last quarter of the eighteenth century was the appearance of David's Oath of the Horatii (shown in Paris, 1785). In this picture the severely monumental style which had died with Nicholas Poussin was so powerfully revived that it dominated French art for a whole generation. Its subject—exemplary civic virtue and disdain of private misfortune—foretells David's personal role as a revolutionary. Its grave, simplified manner, its extreme clarity of space and the calculated grouping of its major figures in superimposed lateral planes, terminated the rococo taste which had survived three generations.