Grand Manner

About

The Grand Manner was the ideal taught by Europe's art academies: large paintings of heroic subjects from the Bible, classical myth and history, with idealised figures, clear gestures and a dignified order drawn from ancient sculpture and the High Renaissance. Raphael, Annibale Carracci and Nicolas Poussin were its models. The French Royal Academy, founded in 1648, ranked history painting above portraiture, landscape and still life, a ranking other academies adopted.

In London, Joshua Reynolds, who became the Royal Academy's president at its founding in 1768, urged painters in his Discourses to generalise rather than copy nature, and borrowed the manner to lend grandeur to portraits. Benjamin West updated it with modern dress in The Death of General Wolfe (1770). Angelica Kauffman painted classical and literary subjects, and Jacques-Louis David gave the style stern moral force in Oath of the Horatii (1784). Romanticism and Realism later eroded its authority.