Meaning & use
Pompier
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Describing a conventional, grandiose style of academic art, especially nineteenth-century French painting, regarded as pretentious or old-fashioned.
See it in a sentence
Critics dismissed the salon painting as pompier art, all polish and no originality.
The gallery's retrospective reassessed pompier painters once mocked by the avant-garde.
A note on using this word
Literally French for 'fireman', the term mocked academic painters for depicting helmeted classical warriors who resembled French firefighters.
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