Joseph-Marie Vien (1716–1809) was born in Montpellier and trained in Paris under Charles-Joseph Natoire. A brilliant student, he won the Prix de Rome in 1743 and spent the years 1744 to 1750 at the French Academy in Rome, where his encounter with the antiquarian scholarship of the Comte de Caylus and the early stirrings of neoclassical taste around the discoveries at Herculaneum and Pompeii proved decisive. These years left him uniquely positioned to serve as a bridge between the fading Rococo manner and the sterner classical idiom that would define French painting in the generation that followed.

Vien's art is distinguished by its transitional character. His history paintings and mythological scenes retain something of the Rococo's sweetness and intimacy while substituting for its ornamental excess a newfound sobriety of colour and composition drawn from antique sources. His celebrated painting La Marchande d'Amours (1763), in which a figure in antique drapery sells winged cupids from a basket, exemplifies this blending of classical archaeology with a residue of Rococo charm. Contemporaries recognised him as the pioneer of what they called the goût grec — the Greek taste — in French painting, though his version of neoclassicism was gentler and more decorative than the heroic severity that his most famous pupil would eventually achieve.

That pupil was Jacques-Louis David, who entered Vien's studio around 1766 and studied under him while competing for the Prix de Rome. When Vien was appointed director of the French Academy in Rome in 1775, David accompanied him, absorbing in the city itself the antique lessons that Vien had taught from a distance. The relationship between master and student shaped the course of French art: Vien's moderation gave way to David's revolutionary classicism, but the conceptual framework Vien had established made that transition possible. Vien also taught François-André Vincent, Jean-Baptiste Regnault, and several other painters who contributed to the formation of the Neoclassical school.

Vien survived the upheavals of the Revolution and lived to receive honours from Napoleon Bonaparte, who recognised his merit with a senatorship. He died in 1809 at the age of ninety-two, the last holder of the royal title of Premier peintre du Roi, and was accorded the exceptional honour of burial in the Panthéon in Paris — the only painter to be interred there.