1. The Eighteenth Century: From Rococo to Revolution

2. Chapter 16: Rococo to Revolution Outline Chapter 16 OUTLINE
The Counter-Reformation Spirit
The Visual Arts in the Baroque Period
Painting in Rome: Caravaggio and the Carracci
Roman Baroque Sculpture and Architecture:
Bernini and Borromini
Baroque Art in France and Spain
Baroque Art in Northern Europe
Baroque Music
The Birth of Opera
Baroque Instrumental and Vocal Music:
Johann Sebastian Bach
Philosophy and Science in the Baroque Period
Galileo
Descartes
Hobbes and Locke
Literature in the Seventeenth Century
French Baroque Comedy and Tragedy
The Novel in Spain: Cervantes
The English Metaphysical Poets
Milton's Heroic Vision
Outline Chapter 16

3. Timeline Chapter 16: Rococo to Revolution
1534 Loyola establishes the Society of Jesus (Jesuits)
1601 Caravaggio, The Calling of Saint Matthew
1620 Artemesia Gentileschi, Judith and Holofernes
1629 Bernini appointed official architect of St. Peter's, Rome
1632 Galileo, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems
1639 Poussin, Et in Arcadia, Ego
1642 Rembrandt, Night Watch
1645 Bernini, Saint Teresa in Ecstasy
1656 Velázquez, Las Meninas (The Maids of Honor)
1665 Vermeer, The Girl With Pearl Earring
1682 Louis XIV moves court to Versailles
Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding;
Second Treatise on Government
1720 Vivaldi, The Four Seasons
1721 J. S. Bach, Brandenburg Concertos

4. The Eighteenth Century: From Rococo to Revolution
The eighteenth century marked the passage in European life from the old aristocratic order to the beginnings of modern society. When the age began Louis XIV was still firmly entrenched; before the century ended Louis XVI and his wife had been executed by the National Convention of the French Revolution-itself inspired, in theory at least, by the American Revolution of a few years earlier.
Elsewhere in Europe enlightened despots like Frederick the Great of Prussia responded to the growing restlessness of their subjects by reorganizing government and improving living conditions. Frederick's court even became one of the leading cultural and intellectual centers of the time; C. P. E. Bach directed the music there and Voltaire spent two years as Frederick's guest.

5. 18th c. Aesthetics: The contrast between revolutionaries and conservatives
The contrast between revolutionaries and conservatives lasted right to the eve of the French Revolution. Jaques Louis David’s, Oath of the Horati, ( , a clarion calll to action and resolve, was painted in the same year as Thomas Gainsborough’s idealized picture of a Haymaker and Sleeping Girl. The former, in keeping with the spirit of the times, prefigures the mood of revolution. The latter turns its back on reality, evoking a nostalgic vision of love among the haystacks.
David
Jaques Louis David
     ( )
         During the French revolution, only one painter stood out with his authentic works of art of political and military figures. Jaques Louis David was his name, and he was one of the very revolutionists of Neo-Classicism.
Jaques Louis David was born into a prosperous family in Paris on August 30, In 1757, his mother left him to live with his uncles after his father was killed. As a child he was never a good student and according to his own words he would just sit in the back of the classroom and draw all day. When he was 16 he went off to the Academie Royale to study art from his distant cousin and rococo painter, J.M Vien. He entered many times in different contests and finally won the Prix de Rome in 1774, and on the trip to Italy he was greatly inspired by the classical art from Rome and Greece, and the Roman inspired seventeenth century painter Nicolas Poussin. Rapidly David developed his own style, his subject matter being history and his characteristics being derived from Roman sculpture. He used the "Oath of Horatti" to actually debut his new "back to the classical period" type style. Proceeding 1789, David had to take on a more realistic style while portraying the French Revolution. David was very active in the Revolution and very popular among a group of extremists called the Montagnards. During the French Revolution he took part in good activities and bad activities. One of the goals he accomplished during the revolution was that he purposed the inventory of national treasury, thereby making him one of the founders of a lot of the museums in France, including the Louvre. The bad choice he made came from the revolution itself. The revolution inspired a kind of rage in David. With his power of position in the revolution, he signed about 300 people to their deaths. For this even the extremists imprisoned him because of the danger in which he was putting all those around him. Later on in 1797 he met Napoleon Bonaparte and all the way until 1815 he was Napoleons offic ial painter, and recorded much of Napoleons reign through his art. During the downfall of Napoleon, David was exiled from France, and went to Brussels, where he went back to his original style of Mythology from the Roman and Greek Classical period. Davids career cleared the way for all romanticists with his strong patriotism, understanding of artistic character, and his wonderful small portraits. David was also the protege of two other painters yet top come in Antoine Jean Gros, and Jean-Aguste-Dominique Ingres. Without David, there wouldn' t have been anyone to represent the change from the rococo of the 18th century to the realism of the 19th, and maybe the transition might not have even occurred.
Thomas Gainsborough
Biography
English portrait and landscape painter, the most versatile English painter of the 18th century. Some of his early portraits show the sitters grouped in a landscape (Mr. and Mrs. Andrews, c. 1750). As he became famous and his sitters fashionable, he adopted a more formal manner that owed something to Anthony Van Dyck (The Blue Boy, c. 1770). His landscapes are of idyllic scenes. During his last years he also painted seascapes and idealized full-size pictures of rustics and country children.
Early life and Suffolk period
Gainsborough was the youngest son of John Gainsborough, a maker of woolen goods. When he was 13, he persuaded his father to send him to London to study on the strength of his promise at landscape. He worked as an assistant to Hubert Gravelot, a French painter and engraver and an important figure in London art circles at the time. From him Gainsborough learned something of the French Rococo idiom, which had a considerable influence on the development of his style. In 1746 in London he married Margaret Burr, the illegitimate daughter of the Duke of Beaufort. Soon afterward he returned to Suffolk and settled in Ipswich in 1752; his daughters Mary and Margaret were born in 1748 and 1752, respectively. In Ipswich Gainsborough met his first biographer, Philip Thicknesse. He early acquired some reputation as a portrait and landscape painter and made an adequate living.
Gainsborough declared that his first love was landscape and began to learn the language of this art from the Dutch 17th-century landscapists, who by 1740 were becoming popular with English collectors; his first landscapes were influenced by Jan Wynants. The earliest dated picture with a landscape background is a study of a bull terrier--Bumper--A Bull Terrier (1745; Sir Edward Bacon Collection, Raveningham, Norfolk), in which many of the details are taken straight from Wynants. But by 1748, when he painted Cornard Wood, Jacob van Ruisdael had become the predominant influence; although it is full of naturalistic detail, Gainsborough probably never painted directly from nature. The Charterhouse, one of his few topographical views, dates from the same year as Cornard Wood and in the subtle effect of light on various surfaces proclaims Dutch influence. In the background to Mr. and Mrs. Andrews, he anticipates the realism of the great English landscapist of the next century, John Constable, but for the most part fancy held sway. In many of the early landscapes the influence of Rococo design learned from Gravelot is evident, together with a feeling for the French pastoral tradition. The Woodcutter Courting a Milkmaid is an Anglicized version of a French theme, which recalls compositions by Jean-Honoré Fragonard. Although Gainsborough preferred landscape, he knew he must paint portraits for economic reasons. The small heads painted in Suffolk, although sometimes rather stiff, are penetrating character studies delicately and freely pencilled, particularly the jaunty self-portrait in a cocked hat at Houghton. Gainsborough painted few full-length portraits in Suffolk. Mr. William Woollaston, although an ambitious composition, is intimate and informal. The Painter's Daughters Chasing a Butterfly, composed in the last years at Ipswich, is, in its easy naturalism and sympathetic understanding, one of the best English portraits of children.
As well as straight portraits, he painted in Suffolk a number of delightful spontaneous groups of small figures in landscapes closely related to conversation pieces. Mr. and Mrs. Andrews, which has been described as the most English of English pictures, is set in a typical Suffolk landscape. Lady and Gentleman in Landscape is more Frenchified, with its vivacious Rococo rhythms, but Heneage Lloyd and His Sister is more stylized, the charming little figures being posed against a conventional background of steps and decorative urns.
Bath period
To obtain a wider public, Gainsborough moved in 1759 to Bath, where his studio was soon thronged with fashionable sitters. He moved in musical and theatrical circles, and among his friends were members of the Linley family, whose portraits he painted. At Bath he also met the actor David Garrick, for whom he had a profound admiration and whom he painted on many occasions. His passion for music and the stage continued throughout his life. In the west country he visited many of the great houses and at Wilton fell under the spell of Anthony Van Dyck, the predominating influence in his later work. In spite of the demand for portraits, he continued to paint landscapes.
In 1761 he sent a portrait of Earl Nugent to the Society of Artists, and in the following year the first notice of his work appeared in the London press. Throughout the 1760s he exhibited regularly in London and in 1768 was elected a foundation member of the Royal Academy. Characteristically he never took much part in the deliberations.
After he moved to Bath, Gainsborough had less time for landscape and worked a good deal from memory, often drawing by candlelight from little model landscapes set up in his studio. About 1760 Peter Paul Rubens supplanted the Dutch painters as Gainsborough's chief love. This is particularly noticeable in Peasants Returning from Market, with its rich colour and beautiful creamy pastel shades. The influence of Rubens is also apparent in The Harvest Wagon in the fluency of the drawing and the scale of the great beech trees so different from the stubby oaks of Suffolk. The idyllic scene is a perfect blend of the real and the ideal. The group in the cart is based on Rubens' Descent from the Cross ( ) in Antwerp cathedral, which Gainsborough copied.
In Bath, Gainsborough had to satisfy a more sophisticated clientele and adopted a more formal and elegant portrait style based largely on a study of Van Dyck at Wilton, where he made a free copy of Van Dyck's painting of the Pembroke family. By 1769, when he painted Isabella Countess of Sefton, it is easy to see the refining influence of Van Dyck in the dignified simplicity of the design and the subtle muted colouring. One of Gainsborough's most famous pictures, The Blue Boy, was probably painted in In painting this subject in Van Dyck dress, he was following an 18th-century fashion in painting, as well as doing homage to his hero. The influence of Van Dyck is most clearly seen in the more official portraits. John, 4th Duke of Argyll in his splendid robes is composed in the grand manner, and Augustus John, Third Earl of Bristol rivals Reynolds' portraits of the kind. Gainsborough preferred to paint his friends rather than public figures, and a group of portraits of the 1760s - Uvedale Price, Sir William St. Quinton, and Thomas Coward, all oldish men of strong character - illustrate Gainsborough's sense of humour and his individual approach to sympathetic sitters.
London period
In 1774 he moved to London and settled in part of Schomberg House in Pall Mall. Fairly soon he began to be noticed by the royal family and partly because of his informality and Tory politics was preferred by George III above the official court painter, Sir Joshua Reynolds. In 1781 he was commissioned to paint the King and Queen.
Gainsborough continued his landscape work. The Watering Place was described by Horace Walpole, the English man of letters, as in the style of Rubens, but it also has much of the classic calm of Claude Lorrain, whose etchings Gainsborough owned. In 1783 he made an expedition to the Lake District to see for himself the wild scenery extolled by the devotees of the picturesque. On his return he painted a number of mountain scenes that have analogies with the work of Gaspard Dughet, whose works were widely distributed in English country houses. Some sea pieces dating from the 1780s show a new kind of realism, harking back to the Dutch seascape tradition. During his last years Gainsborough was haunted by his nostalgia for Arcadia in the English countryside and painted a series of pictures of peasant life more ideal than real, for example, The Cottage Door. But one of the latest landscapes, The Market Cart, is less idealized and more true to nature and looks forward to Constable in its treatment of the light breaking through the massive foliage.
Gainsborough was the only important English portrait painter to devote much time to landscape drawing. He composed a great many drawings in a variety of mediums including chalk, pen and wash, and watercolour, some of them varnished. He was always eager to find new papers and new techniques. He produced a magic lantern to give striking lighting effects; the box is still in the Victoria and Albert Museum, together with some of the slides. In addition Gainsborough made a series of soft-ground etchings and aquatints. He never sold his drawings and, although many of them are closely related to pictures, they are not studies in the ordinary sense but works of art in their own right.
Gainsborough was not methodical in keeping sitter books, and comparatively few of the portraits in the early years in London are dated. In 1777 he exhibited at the Royal Academy the well-known Mrs. Graham, C.F. Abel, William Henry, Duke of Gloucester, and Maria, Duchess of Gloucester, all deliberately glamorous and painted in richly heightened colour. Queen Charlotte is more restrained; the painting of the flounced white dress decorated with ribbons and laces makes her look every inch a queen. It is significant that Gainsborough, unlike most of his contemporaries, did not generally use drapery painters. In 1784 he quarrelled with the Academy because they insisted on hanging the Three Eldest Princesses at the normal height from the floor, which Gainsborough maintained was too high to appreciate his lightness of touch and delicate pencilling. In protest he withdrew the pictures he had intended for the exhibition and never showed again at the Academy.
In some of Gainsborough's later portraits of women, he dispensed with precise finish, and, without sacrificing the likeness, he concentrated on the general effect. Mrs. Sheridan melts into the landscape, while Lady Bate Dudley, a symphony in blue and green, is an insubstantial form, almost an abstract. Mrs. Siddons, on the other hand, shows that Gainsborough could still paint a splendid objective study. Few of the later male portraits are of a pronounced character, but exceptions are two particularly good pictures of musicians, Johann Christian Fischer and the unfinished Lord Abingdon (private collection).
A new venture in 1783 was The Mall in St. James' Park, a park scene described by Horace Walpole as all a flutter like a lady's fan. The Morning Walk, with romanticized figures strolling in a landscape, is painted in the same spirit. The fancy pictures painted in the 1780s gave Gainsborough particular pleasure. They are full-sized, idealized portraits of country children and peasants painted from models - for example, The Cottage Girl with a Bowl of Milk. The idea appeared in immature form in the little rustic Suffolk figures, and he may have been fired to exploit it further by seeing the 17th-century Spanish painter Bartolomé Murillo's St. John, which he copied.
He died in 1788 and was buried in Kew churchyard.
Assessment
Of all the 18th-century English painters, Thomas Gainsborough was the most inventive and original, always prepared to experiment with new ideas and techniques, and yet he complained of his contemporary Sir Joshua Reynolds, Damn him, how various he is. Gainsborough alone among the great portrait painters of the era also devoted serious attention to landscapes. Unlike Reynolds, he was no great believer in an academic tradition and laughed at the fashion for history painting; an instinctive painter, he delighted in the poetry of paint. In his racy letters Gainsborough shows a warm-hearted and generous character and an independent mind. His comments on his own work and methods, as well as on some of the old masters, are very revealing and throw considerable light on contemporary views of art.
Thomas Gainsborugh
Haymaker
and Sleeping Girl
1784
David, Jacques-Louis
The Oath of the Horatii 1784

6. Rococo Art
Rococo Art In the visual arts the principal style to emerge from the
baroque splendors of the previous century was the rococo.
Lighter and less grandiose, it was wonderfully suited to the civilized
amenities of aristocratic life. The chief rococo painters were French
and Italian-appropriately enough, since rulers both in France and in
the kingdoms of Italy made few concessions to the growing demands
for reform. In architecture the builders of Parisian private houses
such as the Hotel de Soubise indulged their taste for fanciful
decoration, while the rococo churches of southern Germany and
Austria represent some of the happiest of all eighteenth-century
Achievements.

7. Jean Antoine Watteau Les Charmes de la Vie
(The Music Party) c. 1718
Pilgrimage to Cythera 1717 Oil on canvas
Jean Antoine Watteau
b. 1684, Valenciennes, d. 1721, Nogent-sur-Marne)
Biography
The greatest French painter of his period and one of the key figures of Rococo art. He was born at Valenciennes, which had passed to France from the Spanish Netherlands only six years before his birth, and he was regarded by contemporaries as a Flemish painter. There are indeed strong links with Flanders in his art, but it also has a sophistication that is quintessentially French.
He moved to Paris in about 1702 and c he worked with Gillot, who stimulated his interest in theatrical costume and scenes from daily life. Soon afterwards he joined Claude Audran, Keeper of the Luxembourg Palace, and thus had access to Rubens's Marie de Médicis paintings, which were of enormous influence on him, even though Rubens's robustness was far removed from the fragile delicacy that characterized Watteau's art. Rubens was one of the prime inspirations for the type of picture with which Watteau is most associated - the fête galante, in which exquisitely dressed young people idle away their time in a dreamy, romantic, pastoral setting. The tradition of lovers in a parkland setting goes back via Giorgione to the medieval type known as the Garden of Love, but Watteau was the first painter to make the theme his own, and his individuality was recognized by his contemporaries.
In 1717 he submitted a characteristic work, The Pilgrimage to the Island of Cythera (Louvre, Paris; a slightly later variant is in Schloss Charlottenburg, Berlin), as his reception piece to the Academy, and owing to the difficulty of fitting him into recognized categories was received as a 'peintre de fêtes galantes', a title created expressly for him. He was, indeed, a highly independent artist, who did not readily submit to the will of patrons or officialdom, and the novelty and freshness of his work delivered French painting from the yoke of Italianate academicism. creating a truly 'Parisian' outlook that endured until the Neoclassicism of David. Watteau's world is a highly artificial one (apart from scenes of love he took his themes mainly from the theatre), but underlying the frivolity is a feeling of melancholy, reflecting the certain knowledge that all the pleasures of the flesh are transient. This poetic gravity distinguishes him from his imitators, and parallels are often drawn between Watteau's own life and character and the content of his paintings. He was notorious for his irritable and restless temperament and died early of tuberculosis, and it is felt that the constant reminder of his own mortality that his illness entailed 'infected' his pictures with a melancholic mood.
In 1719 he travelled to London, almost certainly to consult the celebrated physician Dr Richard Mead, but the hard English winter worsened his condition. His early death came when he may have been making a new departure in his art, for his last important work combines something of the straightforward naturalism of his early pictures in the Flemish tradition with the exquisite sensitivity of his fêtes galantes: it is a shop sign painted for the picture dealer Edmé Gersaint and known as L' Enseigne de Gersaint (Staatliche Museen, Berlin, 1721 ).
Watteau was careless in matters of material technique and many of his paintings are in consequence in a poor state of preservation. A complete picture of his genius depends all the more, then, on his numerous superb drawings, many of them scintillating studies from the life. He collected his drawings into large bound volumes and used these books as a reference source for his paintings (the same figure often appears in more than one picture).
In spite of his difficult temperament, Watteau had many loyal friends and supporters who recognized his genius, and although his reputation suffered with the Revolution and the growth of Neoclassicism, he always had distinguished admirers. It is perhaps as a colourist that he has had the most profound influence. His method of juxtaposing flecks of colour on the canvas was carried further by Delacroix and later reduced to a science by Seurat and the Neo-Impressionists. Watteau's principal, but much inferior, followers were Lancret and Pater. He also had a nephew and a great-nephew (father and son) who worked more-or-less in his manner. They are both known as 'Watteau de Lille' after their main place of work - Louis-Joseph Watteau ( ) and François-Louis-Joseph Watteau ( ).
The Toilette ND

8. Francois Boucher The Toilet of Venus, 1751
Name: François Boucher Born: Paris, France, 1703 Died: Paris, France, 1770
At the age of 17 the young Boucher was apprenticed by his father, a designer of embroidery patterns, to François Lemoyne. However, after only 3 months, he went to work for the engraver Jean-François Cars. Within 3 years he had already won the Grand Prix de Rome, although he did not take up the ensuing opportunity to study in Italy until 4 years later. On his return in 1731, he was admitted to the Academy as a historical painter, becoming a member in 1734, then ever onwards and upwards in his brilliant career: from professor to Rector of the Academy, becoming head of the Royal Gobelin factory in 1755 and finally "Premier Peintre du Roi" (First Painter of the King) in 1765.
Drawing on the influence of Watteau and Rubens, Boucher's early work celebrates the pastoral and idyllic, depicting nature and landscape with great finesse. However, the eroticism of his shepherds and shepherdesses show very little of the traditional rural innocence, and his mythological scenes are amorous and sensual rather than traditionally heroic.
Boucher was the favourite painter of the Marquise de Pompadour ( ), mistress of King Louis XV, whose name became synonymous with Rococo art, and it is in his portraits, particularly of her, that this style is clearly exemplified. Paintings such as "The Breakfast" of 1739 also show Boucher as a master of the genre scene in which he regularly used his own wife and family as models. However, such intimate family scenes are in contrast to the libertine style as seen in his "Odalisque" portraits, the dark-haired version of which prompted Diderot to claim that Boucher was "prostituting his own wife", and the "Blonde Odalisque" in which the extra-marital relationships of the King were evoked. Such private commissions for wealthy collectors gained Boucher his lasting notoriety and, after the censure of Diderot with his new morality, his final creative years his reputation came under increasing critical attack.
Boucher was not only a painter, he also designed theatre costumes and sets, and the amorous intrigues of the comic operas of Favart ( ) involving shepherds and shepherdesses, closely parallel his own style of painting. Tapestry design was also a major activity, together with his design activities for the opera and the royal palaces of Versailles, Fontainebleu and Choisy, all of which augmented his earlier reputation, resulting in many engravings from his work and even reproduction of his themes onto porcelain and biscuit-ware at the Vincennes and Sèvres factories.
As with that of his patron, Madame de Pompadour, Boucher's name became synonymous with the French Rococo style, leading the Goncourt brothers to write (with some exaggeration): "Boucher is one of those men who represent the taste of a century, who express, personify and embody it".
François Boucher Morning Coffee 1739

9. Jean Honore Fragonard The Swing 1767 Oil on canvas Psyche
FRAGONARD, Jean-HonoréFrench painter (b. 1732, Grasse, d. 1806, Paris)
Biography
French Rococo painter whose most familiar works, such as The Swing (c. 1766), are characterized by delicate hedonism.
Fragonard was the son of a haberdasher's assistant. The family moved to Paris about 1738, and in 1747 the boy was apprenticed to a lawyer, who, noticing his appetite for drawing, suggested that he be taught painting. François Boucher was prevailed upon to accept him as a pupil (c. 1748), and in 1752, Fragonard's elementary training completed, Boucher recommended that he compete for a Prix de Rome scholarship, which meant study under the court painter to Louis XV, Carle Van Loo, in Paris. On Sept. 17, 1756, Fragonard set off with other scholarship winners for the French Academy at Rome.
At the academy Fragonard copied many paintings, chiefly by Roman Baroque artists, and, with his friend the French painter Hubert Robert, made numerous sketches of the Roman countryside. When his scholarship ended in July 1759, he was allowed to remain in residence until, in late November, he met a wealthy amateur artist, the Abbé de Saint-Non, who was to become one of his chief patrons. Early in 1760 Saint-Non took Fragonard and Robert on a prolonged tour of Italy, where the two artists studied Italian paintings and antiquities and made hundreds of sketches of local scenery.
In 1761, after returning to Paris, Fragonard exhibited a few landscape paintings and the large Coresus Sacrifices Himself to Save Callirhoe at the Salon, where it was purchased for King Louis XV. Consequently, the artist was commissioned to paint a pendant, or companion piece, granted a studio in the Louvre Palace, and accepted as an Academician. Nevertheless, after 1767 he almost ceased to exhibit at the salons, concentrating on landscapes, often in the manner of the 17th-century Dutch painter Jacob van Ruisdael (Return of the Herd, Worcester); portraits; and decorative, semierotic outdoor party scenes (The Swing) in the style of Boucher but more fluently painted. His admiration for Rembrandt, Peter Paul Rubens, Frans Hals, and a Venetian contemporary, Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, emerges in a large series of loosely and vigorously executed heads of old men, painted probably between 1760 and 1767 (Head of an Old Man), followed by a series of portraits (c ) in a similar style and in which the sitters were real persons, but their fantastic costumes were emphasized rather than facial expressions.
In 1769 he married Marie-Anne Gérard from Grasse and shortly afterward received the accolade of fashion, when in 1770 he was commissioned by Mme du Barry to decorate her newly built Pavillon de Louveciennes, with four large paintings (Progress of Love, Frick Collection, New York City), and in 1772 he received a somewhat similar commission from the notorious actress Madeleine Guimard. Neither was a success, the Louveciennes paintings probably being rejected as too Rococo for a totally Neoclassical setting.
A journey to the Low Countries perhaps in increased his admiration for Rembrandt and Hals and was reflected in his later portraits. A second visit to Italy followed in As before, he concentrated on drawing picturesque Italian landscape subjects rather than on painting. The return journey was taken through Vienna, Prague, and Germany. On his return to Paris, the family was joined by his wife's 14-year-old sister, Marguerite, with whom Fragonard fell passionately in love. Consequently, he turned his interests toward a new type of subject matter: domestic scenes inspired by Jean-Jacques Rousseau's moral philosophy or romantic novels (The Happy Family) or scenes concerned with children's upbringing, in which his son Évariste (born 1780) frequently figures (The Schoolmistress).
In the last years preceding the French Revolution, Fragonard turned finally to Neoclassical subject matter and developed a less fluent Neoclassical style of painting (The Fountain of Love), which becomes increasingly evident in his later works, particularly the genre scenes executed in collaboration with Marguerite Gérard (The Beloved Child).
Fragonard's art was too closely associated with the pre-Revolutionary period to make him acceptable during the Revolution, which also deprived him of private patrons. At first he retired to Grasse but returned to Paris in 1791, where the protection of the leading Neoclassical painter Jacques-Louis David obtained for him a post with the Museum Commission, but he was deprived of this in He spent the rest of his life in obscurity, painting little. His death in 1806 passed almost unnoticed, and his work remained unfashionable until well after 1850.
Fragonard has been bracketed with Watteau as one of the two great poetic painters of the unpoetical 18th century in France. A prodigiously active artist, he produced more than 550 paintings, several thousand drawings (although many hundreds are known to be lost), and 35 etchings. His style, based primarily on that of Rubens, was rapid, vigorous, and fluent, never tight or fussy like that of so many of his contemporaries.
Although the greater part of his active life was passed during the Neoclassical period, he continued to paint in a Rococo idiom until shortly before the French Revolution. Only five paintings by Fragonard are dated, but the chronology of the rest can be fairly accurately established from other sources such as engravings, documents, etc.
Psyche
showing her Sisters her Gifts from Cupid 1753 Oil on canvas

10. Thomas Gainsborough Conversation in a Park c. 1740 Oil on canvas
GAINSBOROUGH, Thomas (b. 1727, Sudbury, d. 1788, London)
Biography
English portrait and landscape painter, the most versatile English painter of the 18th century. Some of his early portraits show the sitters grouped in a landscape (Mr. and Mrs. Andrews, c. 1750). As he became famous and his sitters fashionable, he adopted a more formal manner that owed something to Anthony Van Dyck (The Blue Boy, c. 1770). His landscapes are of idyllic scenes. During his last years he also painted seascapes and idealized full-size pictures of rustics and country children.
Early life and Suffolk period
Gainsborough was the youngest son of John Gainsborough, a maker of woolen goods. When he was 13, he persuaded his father to send him to London to study on the strength of his promise at landscape. He worked as an assistant to Hubert Gravelot, a French painter and engraver and an important figure in London art circles at the time. From him Gainsborough learned something of the French Rococo idiom, which had a considerable influence on the development of his style. In 1746 in London he married Margaret Burr, the illegitimate daughter of the Duke of Beaufort. Soon afterward he returned to Suffolk and settled in Ipswich in 1752; his daughters Mary and Margaret were born in 1748 and 1752, respectively. In Ipswich Gainsborough met his first biographer, Philip Thicknesse. He early acquired some reputation as a portrait and landscape painter and made an adequate living.
Gainsborough declared that his first love was landscape and began to learn the language of this art from the Dutch 17th-century landscapists, who by 1740 were becoming popular with English collectors; his first landscapes were influenced by Jan Wynants. The earliest dated picture with a landscape background is a study of a bull terrier--Bumper--A Bull Terrier (1745; Sir Edward Bacon Collection, Raveningham, Norfolk), in which many of the details are taken straight from Wynants. But by 1748, when he painted Cornard Wood, Jacob van Ruisdael had become the predominant influence; although it is full of naturalistic detail, Gainsborough probably never painted directly from nature. The Charterhouse, one of his few topographical views, dates from the same year as Cornard Wood and in the subtle effect of light on various surfaces proclaims Dutch influence. In the background to Mr. and Mrs. Andrews, he anticipates the realism of the great English landscapist of the next century, John Constable, but for the most part fancy held sway. In many of the early landscapes the influence of Rococo design learned from Gravelot is evident, together with a feeling for the French pastoral tradition. The Woodcutter Courting a Milkmaid is an Anglicized version of a French theme, which recalls compositions by Jean-Honoré Fragonard. Although Gainsborough preferred landscape, he knew he must paint portraits for economic reasons. The small heads painted in Suffolk, although sometimes rather stiff, are penetrating character studies delicately and freely pencilled, particularly the jaunty self-portrait in a cocked hat at Houghton. Gainsborough painted few full-length portraits in Suffolk. Mr. William Woollaston, although an ambitious composition, is intimate and informal. The Painter's Daughters Chasing a Butterfly, composed in the last years at Ipswich, is, in its easy naturalism and sympathetic understanding, one of the best English portraits of children.
As well as straight portraits, he painted in Suffolk a number of delightful spontaneous groups of small figures in landscapes closely related to conversation pieces. Mr. and Mrs. Andrews, which has been described as the most English of English pictures, is set in a typical Suffolk landscape. Lady and Gentleman in Landscape is more Frenchified, with its vivacious Rococo rhythms, but Heneage Lloyd and His Sister is more stylized, the charming little figures being posed against a conventional background of steps and decorative urns.
Bath period
To obtain a wider public, Gainsborough moved in 1759 to Bath, where his studio was soon thronged with fashionable sitters. He moved in musical and theatrical circles, and among his friends were members of the Linley family, whose portraits he painted. At Bath he also met the actor David Garrick, for whom he had a profound admiration and whom he painted on many occasions. His passion for music and the stage continued throughout his life. In the west country he visited many of the great houses and at Wilton fell under the spell of Anthony Van Dyck, the predominating influence in his later work. In spite of the demand for portraits, he continued to paint landscapes.
In 1761 he sent a portrait of Earl Nugent to the Society of Artists, and in the following year the first notice of his work appeared in the London press. Throughout the 1760s he exhibited regularly in London and in 1768 was elected a foundation member of the Royal Academy. Characteristically he never took much part in the deliberations.
After he moved to Bath, Gainsborough had less time for landscape and worked a good deal from memory, often drawing by candlelight from little model landscapes set up in his studio. About 1760 Peter Paul Rubens supplanted the Dutch painters as Gainsborough's chief love. This is particularly noticeable in Peasants Returning from Market, with its rich colour and beautiful creamy pastel shades. The influence of Rubens is also apparent in The Harvest Wagon in the fluency of the drawing and the scale of the great beech trees so different from the stubby oaks of Suffolk. The idyllic scene is a perfect blend of the real and the ideal. The group in the cart is based on Rubens' Descent from the Cross ( ) in Antwerp cathedral, which Gainsborough copied.
In Bath, Gainsborough had to satisfy a more sophisticated clientele and adopted a more formal and elegant portrait style based largely on a study of Van Dyck at Wilton, where he made a free copy of Van Dyck's painting of the Pembroke family. By 1769, when he painted Isabella Countess of Sefton, it is easy to see the refining influence of Van Dyck in the dignified simplicity of the design and the subtle muted colouring. One of Gainsborough's most famous pictures, The Blue Boy, was probably painted in In painting this subject in Van Dyck dress, he was following an 18th-century fashion in painting, as well as doing homage to his hero. The influence of Van Dyck is most clearly seen in the more official portraits. John, 4th Duke of Argyll in his splendid robes is composed in the grand manner, and Augustus John, Third Earl of Bristol rivals Reynolds' portraits of the kind. Gainsborough preferred to paint his friends rather than public figures, and a group of portraits of the 1760s - Uvedale Price, Sir William St. Quinton, and Thomas Coward, all oldish men of strong character - illustrate Gainsborough's sense of humour and his individual approach to sympathetic sitters.
London period
In 1774 he moved to London and settled in part of Schomberg House in Pall Mall. Fairly soon he began to be noticed by the royal family and partly because of his informality and Tory politics was preferred by George III above the official court painter, Sir Joshua Reynolds. In 1781 he was commissioned to paint the King and Queen.
Gainsborough continued his landscape work. The Watering Place was described by Horace Walpole, the English man of letters, as in the style of Rubens, but it also has much of the classic calm of Claude Lorrain, whose etchings Gainsborough owned. In 1783 he made an expedition to the Lake District to see for himself the wild scenery extolled by the devotees of the picturesque. On his return he painted a number of mountain scenes that have analogies with the work of Gaspard Dughet, whose works were widely distributed in English country houses. Some sea pieces dating from the 1780s show a new kind of realism, harking back to the Dutch seascape tradition. During his last years Gainsborough was haunted by his nostalgia for Arcadia in the English countryside and painted a series of pictures of peasant life more ideal than real, for example, The Cottage Door. But one of the latest landscapes, The Market Cart, is less idealized and more true to nature and looks forward to Constable in its treatment of the light breaking through the massive foliage.
Gainsborough was the only important English portrait painter to devote much time to landscape drawing. He composed a great many drawings in a variety of mediums including chalk, pen and wash, and watercolour, some of them varnished. He was always eager to find new papers and new techniques. He produced a magic lantern to give striking lighting effects; the box is still in the Victoria and Albert Museum, together with some of the slides. In addition Gainsborough made a series of soft-ground etchings and aquatints. He never sold his drawings and, although many of them are closely related to pictures, they are not studies in the ordinary sense but works of art in their own right.
Gainsborough was not methodical in keeping sitter books, and comparatively few of the portraits in the early years in London are dated. In 1777 he exhibited at the Royal Academy the well-known Mrs. Graham, C.F. Abel, William Henry, Duke of Gloucester, and Maria, Duchess of Gloucester, all deliberately glamorous and painted in richly heightened colour. Queen Charlotte is more restrained; the painting of the flounced white dress decorated with ribbons and laces makes her look every inch a queen. It is significant that Gainsborough, unlike most of his contemporaries, did not generally use drapery painters. In 1784 he quarrelled with the Academy because they insisted on hanging the Three Eldest Princesses at the normal height from the floor, which Gainsborough maintained was too high to appreciate his lightness of touch and delicate pencilling. In protest he withdrew the pictures he had intended for the exhibition and never showed again at the Academy.
In some of Gainsborough's later portraits of women, he dispensed with precise finish, and, without sacrificing the likeness, he concentrated on the general effect. Mrs. Sheridan melts into the landscape, while Lady Bate Dudley, a symphony in blue and green, is an insubstantial form, almost an abstract. Mrs. Siddons, on the other hand, shows that Gainsborough could still paint a splendid objective study. Few of the later male portraits are of a pronounced character, but exceptions are two particularly good pictures of musicians, Johann Christian Fischer and the unfinished Lord Abingdon (private collection).
A new venture in 1783 was The Mall in St. James' Park, a park scene described by Horace Walpole as all a flutter like a lady's fan. The Morning Walk, with romanticized figures strolling in a landscape, is painted in the same spirit. The fancy pictures painted in the 1780s gave Gainsborough particular pleasure. They are full-sized, idealized portraits of country children and peasants painted from models - for example, The Cottage Girl with a Bowl of Milk. The idea appeared in immature form in the little rustic Suffolk figures, and he may have been fired to exploit it further by seeing the 17th-century Spanish painter Bartolomé Murillo's St. John, which he copied.
He died in 1788 and was buried in Kew churchyard.
Assessment
Of all the 18th-century English painters, Thomas Gainsborough was the most inventive and original, always prepared to experiment with new ideas and techniques, and yet he complained of his contemporary Sir Joshua Reynolds, Damn him, how various he is. Gainsborough alone among the great portrait painters of the era also devoted serious attention to landscapes. Unlike Reynolds, he was no great believer in an academic tradition and laughed at the fashion for history painting; an instinctive painter, he delighted in the poetry of paint. In his racy letters Gainsborough shows a warm-hearted and generous character and an independent mind. His comments on his own work and methods, as well as on some of the old masters, are very revealing and throw considerable light on contemporary views of art.
Conversation in a Park c Oil on canvas
Mrs Grace Dalrymple Elliot c Oil on canvas

11. Giovanni Battista Tiepolo
The Institution
of the Rosary Fresco
TIEPOLO, Giovanni Battista (b. 1696, Venezia, d. 1770, Madrid)
Biography
Giovanni Baptista (Giambattista) Tiepolo was the last of the great Venetian decorators, the purest exponent of the Italian Rococo, and arguably the greatest painter of the 18th century. He was trained under an obscure painter named Lazzarini but was really formed by the study of Sebastiano Ricci and Piazzetta among living painter and Veronese among the older masters. He was received into the Fraglia (Guild) in 1717 but had already painted the Sacrifice of Abraham ( , Venice, Ospedaletto), a dark picture very much in the manner of Piazzetta and the 17th century generally. In 1719 he married the sister of Guardi and at about this time his own lighter and loose style began to form.
His first great commission for fresco decorations came in 1725, when he began the work in the Archbishop's Palace at Udine (completed 1728). These already show the virtuosity of his handling, the light tone and pale colours necessitated by fresco obviously helping him to break free from the dark Piazettesque models he had previously followed. The Udine frescoes also show him developing as the creator of a world in steep perspective beyond the picture plane, with the architecture receding into dizzy distances. The highly specialized work of painting these architectural perspectives was done by Mengozzi-Colonna, who did this work for Tiepolo for most of his life.
Following the Udine frescoes Tiepolo travelled widely in Northern Italy, painting many more frescoes in palaces and churches, as well as altarpieces in oil which culminate in the gigantic Gathering of the Manna and Sacrifice of Melchidezek (c , Verolanuova, Parish Church), each of which is about 10 m high. The frescoes of this period culminate in the Antony and Cleopatra series in the Palazzo Labia, Venice, which were probably finished just before 1750, when he left Venice for Würzburg.
He was invited to decorate the ceiling of the Kaisersaal in the Residenz at Würzburg by the Prince-Bishop, Karl Phillip von Greiffenklau, and Tiepolo and his sons Giandomenico and Lorenzo arrived in Würzburg at the end of 1750 and remained there until 1753, replacing Johann Zick, a German pupil of Piazzetta. He painted the staircase with frescoes, some overdoors, and some altarpieces as well as the Kaisersaal, helped in the gigantic task by both his sons as well as several assistants. The Palace itself is a superb example of German Rococo architecture and the combination of architecture and painting into one vast and airy allegory - apparently referring to the Prince-Bishop as a patron, but including Barbarossa and German history - is perhaps the most successful even in Tiepolo's career.
In 1755, after his return to Venice, he was elected first President of the Venetian Academy and in 1761 he was invited to Spain to decorate the Royal Palace in Madrid by Charles III. He arrived in 1762, with his sons and assistants, and painted the huge ceilings in the Palace in four years. In 1767 Charles commissioned seven altarpieces for Aranjuez, but Tiepolo's last years in Spain were embittered by intrigues on behalf of Mengs, the representative of that Neoclassicism which was soon to condemn his kind of splendid and carefree painting as frivolous. He died suddenly in Madrid.
His enormous output of frescoes and altarpieces was partly due to his practice (like Rubens before him) of painting small 'modelli' which, when approved by the client, could be carried out by his skilled assistants under his own supervision. Scores of these modelli and sketches survive, together with hundreds of drawings. He painted very few portraits. He also etched many plates, and, with Marco Ricci, was one of the founders of the great school of 18-century Venetian etchers.
Education of the Virgin 1732 Oil on canvas

12. The Neoclassical Style
The other important artistic style of the period was the neoclassical. Inspired by the increasing quantities of ancient art being excavated at Pompeii and elsewhere, artists began to turn to the style and subjects of classical antiquity, which provided a refreshing contrast to the theatricality of baroque and the artificiality of rococo. Furthermore, in the history of the Roman Republic (at least as they perceived it) revolutionary artists of the later eighteenth century found a vehicle for expressing their battle for freedom. In many cases painters incorporated into their works discoveries from the various excavations in progress: the French Jacques Louis David in his paintings for the Revolution as well as the English Joshua Reynolds in his portraits of society women.
Ancient sculpture provided a stimulus to some of the leading artists of the day, most notably the Italian Antonio Canova and the French Jean Antoine Houdon. Both of them worked principally during and after the revolutions; Houdon even produced a neoclassical statue of George Washington. Washington and the other leaders of the American Revolution turned naturally to classical architecture for their public buildings. Among the finest examples is Thomas Jefferson's State Capitol at Richmond.

13. David, Jacques-Louis Death of Marat 1793
David, Jacques-Louis ( ). French painter, one of the central figures of Neoclassicism.
He had his first training with Boucher, a distant relative, but Boucher realized that their temperaments were opposed and sent David to Vien. David went to Italy with the latter in 1776, Vien having been appointed director of the French Academy at Rome, David having won the Prix de Rome.
In Italy, David was able to indulge his bent for the antique and came into contact with the initiators of the new Classical revival, including Gavin Hamilton. In 1780 he returned to Paris, and in the 1780s his position was firmly established as the embodiment of the social and moral reaction from the frivolity of the Rococo.
The Lictors Bring to Brutus the Bodies of His Sons Paris 1789 (150 Kb); Oil on canvas, 323 x 422 cm (127 1/4 x 166 1/4 in); Musee du Louvre, Paris
His uncompromising subordination of color to drawing and his economy of statement were in keeping with the new severity of taste. His themes gave expression to the new cult of the civic virtues of stoical self-sacrifice, devotion to duty, honesty, and austerity. Seldom have paintings so completely typified the sentiment of an age as David's The Oath of the Horatii (Louvre, Paris, 1784), Brutus and his Dead Sons (Louvre, 1789), and The Death of Socrates (Metropolitan Museum, New York, 1787). They were received with acclamation by critics and public alike. Reynolds compared the Socrates with Michelangelo's Sistine Ceiling and Raphael's Stanze, and after ten visits to the Salon described it as `in every sense perfect'.
The Death of Socrates (100 Kb); Oil on canvas, x cm (51 x 77 1/4 in); The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Marat Assassinated (120 Kb); Oil on canvas, 165 x cm (65 x 50 1/2 in); Musees Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique
David was in active sympathy with the Revolution, becoming a Deputy and voting for the execution of Louis XVI. His position was unchallenged as the painter of the Revolution. His three paintings of `martyrs of the Revolution', though conceived as portraits, raised portraiture into the domain of universal tragedy. They were: The Death of Lepeletier (now known only from an engraving), The Death of Marat (Musées Royaux, Brussels, 1793), and The Death of Bara (Musée Calvet, Avignon, unfinished). After the fall of Robespierre (1794), however, he was imprisoned, but was released on the plea of his wife, who had previously divorced him because of his Revolutionary sympathies (she was a royalist). They were remarried in 1796, and David's Intervention of the Sabine Women (Louvre, ), begun while he was in prison, is said to have been painted to honor her, its theme being one of love prevailing over conflict. It was also interpreted at the time, however, as a plea for conciliation in the civil strife that France suffered after the Revolution and it was the work that re-established David's fortunes and brought him to the attention of Napoleon, who appointed him his official painter.
The Sabine Women Enforcing Peace by Running Between the Combatants detail, (70 Kb); Louvre
David became an ardent supporter of Napoleon and retained under him the dominant social and artistic position which he had previously held. Between 1802 and 1807 he painted a series of pictures glorifying the exploits of the Emperor, among them the enormous Coronation of Napoleon (Louvre, ). These works show a change both in technique and in feeling from the earlier Republican works. The cold colors and severe compositions of the heroic paintings gave place to a new feeling for pageantry which had something in common with Romantic painting, although he always remained opposed to the Romantic school.
Napoleon in His Study (130 Kb); Oil on canvas, x cm (80 1/4 x 49 1/4 in); The National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
Napoleon at St. Bernard (30 Kb)
With the fall of Napoleon, David went into exile in Brussels, and his work weakened as the possibility of exerting a moral and social influence receded. (Until recently his late history paintings were generally scorned by critics, but their sensuous qualities are now winning them a more appreciative audience.) He continued to be an outstanding portraitist, but he never surpassed such earlier achievements as the great Napoleon Crossing the Alps (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, 1800, one of four versions) or the cooly erotic Madame Récamier (Louvre, 1800).
His work had a resounding influence on the development of French -- and indeed European -- painting, and his many pupils included Gérard, Gros, and Ingres.
Death of Marat 1793
Napoleon in His Study 1812, Oil on canvas

14. Joshua Reynolds
REYNOLDS, Sir Joshua (b. 1723, Plympton Earl, d. 1792, London)
English portrait painter and aesthetician who dominated English artistic life in the middle and late 18th century. Through his art and teaching, he attempted to lead British painting away from the indigenous anecdotal pictures of the early 18th century toward the formal rhetoric of the continental Grand Style. With the founding of the Royal Academy in 1768, Reynolds was elected its first president and knighted by King George III.
Early life
Reynolds attended the Plympton grammar school of which his father, a clergyman, was master. The young Reynolds became well read in the writings of classical antiquity and throughout his life was to be much interested in literature, counting many of the finest British authors of the 18th century among his closest friends. Reynolds early aspired to become an artist, and in 1740 he was apprenticed for four years in London to Thomas Hudson, a conventional portraitist and the pupil and son-in-law of Jonathan Richardson. In 1743 he returned to Devon and began painting at Plymouth naval portraits that reveal his inexperience. Returning to London for two years in 1744, he began to acquire a knowledge of the old masters and an independent style marked by bold brushwork and the use of impasto, a thick surface texture of paint, such as in his portrait of Captain the Honourable John Hamilton (1746).
Back in Devon in 1746, he painted a large group portrait of the Eliot Family (c. 1746/47), which clearly indicates that he had studied the large-scale portrait of the Pembroke Family ( ) by the Flemish Baroque painter Sir Anthony Van Dyck, whose style of portrait painting influenced English portraiture throughout the 18th century. In 1749 Reynolds sailed with his friend Augustus Keppel to Minorca, one of the Balearic Islands off the Mediterranean coast of Spain. A fall from a horse detained him for five months and permanently scarred his lip - the scar being a prominent feature in his subsequent self-portraits. From Minorca he went to Rome, where he remained for two years, devoting himself to studying the great masterpieces of ancient Greco-Roman sculpture and of Italian painting. The impressions that he retained from this visit were to inspire his paintings and his Discourses for the rest of his life, for he felt that it was by allying painting with scholarship that he could best achieve his ambition of raising the status of his profession back in England. While returning home via Florence, Bologna, and Venice, he became absorbed by the compositions and colour of the great Renaissance Venetian painters of the 16th century: Titian, Jacopo Tintoretto, and Paolo Veronese. The Venetian tradition's emphasis on colour and the effect of light and shading had a lasting influence on Reynolds, and, although all his life he preached the need for young artists to study the sculptural definition of form characteristic of Florentine and Roman painters, his own works are redolent of the Venetian style.
Later years
In 1753 Reynolds settled in London, where he was to live for the rest of his life. His success was assured from the first, and by 1755 he was employing studio assistants to help him execute the numerous portrait commissions he received. The early London portraits have a vigour and naturalness about them that is perhaps best exemplified in a likeness of Honourable Augustus Keppel ( ; National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London). The pose is not original, being a reversal of the Apollo Belvedere, an ancient Roman copy of a mid-4th-century-BC Hellenistic statue Reynolds had seen in the Vatican. But the fact that the subject (who was a British naval officer) is shown striding along the seashore introduced a new kind of vigour into the tradition of English portraiture. In these first years in London, Reynolds' knowledge of Venetian painting is very apparent in such works as the portraits of Lord Cathcart (1753/54) and Lord Ludlow (1755). Of his domestic portraits, those of Nelly O'Brien ( ) and of Georgiana, Countess Spencer, and Her Daughter (1761) are especially notable for their tender charm and careful observation.
After 1760 Reynolds' style became increasingly classical and self-conscious. As he fell under the influence of the classical Baroque painters of the Bolognese school of the 17th century and the archaeological interest in Greco-Roman antiquity that was sweeping Europe at the time, the pose and clothes of his sitters took on a more rigidly antique pattern, in consequence losing much of the sympathy and understanding of his earlier works.
There were no public exhibitions of contemporary artists in London before 1760, when Reynolds helped found the Society of Artists and the first of many successful exhibitions was held. The patronage of George III was sought, and in 1768 the Royal Academy was founded. Although Reynolds' painting had found no favour at court, he was the obvious candidate for the presidency, and the king confirmed his election and knighted him. Reynolds guided the policy of the academy with such skill that the pattern he set has been followed with little variation ever since. The yearly Discourses that he delivered at the academy clearly mirrored many of his own thoughts and aspirations, as well as his own problems of line versus colour and public and private portraiture, and gave advice to those beginning their artistic careers.
From 1769 nearly all of Reynolds' most important works appeared in the academy. In certain exhibitions he included historical pieces, such as Ugolino (1773), which were perhaps his least successful works. Many of his child studies are tender and even amusing, though now and again the sentiment tends to be excessive. Two of the most enchanting are Master Crewe as Henry VIII ( ) and Lady Caroline Scott as Winter (1778). His most ambitious portrait commission was the Family of the Duke of Marlborough (1777).
In 1781 Reynolds visited Flanders and Holland, where he studied the work of the great Flemish Baroque painter Peter Paul Rubens. This seems to have affected his own style, for in the manner of Rubens' later works the texture of his picture surface becomes far richer. This is particularly true of his portrait of the Duchess of Devonshire and Her Daughter (1786). Reynolds was never a mere society painter or flatterer. It has been suggested that his deafness gave him a clearer insight into the character of his sitters, the lack of one faculty sharpening the use of his eyes. His vast learning allowed him to vary his poses and style so often that the well-known remark of Thomas Gainsborough, Damn him, how various he is! is entirely understandable. In 1782 Reynolds had a paralytic stroke, and about the same time he was saddened by bickerings within the Royal Academy. Seven years later his eyesight began to fail, and he delivered his last Discourse at the academy in He died in 1792 and was buried in St. Paul's Cathedral.
Personality and criticism
Reynolds preferred the company of men of letters to that of his fellow artists and was friends with Samuel Johnson, Edmund Burke, and Oliver Goldsmith, among others. He never married, and his house was kept for him by his sister Frances.
Reynolds' state portraits of the king and queen were never considered a success, and he seldom painted for them; but the Prince of Wales patronized him extensively, and there were few distinguished families or individuals who did not sit for him. Nonetheless, some of his finest portraits are those of his intimate friends and of fashionable women of questionable reputation.
Unfortunately, Reynolds' technique was not always entirely sound, and many of his paintings have suffered as a result. After his visit to Italy, he tried to produce the effects of Tintoretto and Titian by using transparent glazes over a monochrome underpainting, but the pigment he used for his flesh tones was not permanent and even in his lifetime began to fade, causing the overpale faces of many surviving portraits. In the 1760s Reynolds began to use more extensively bitumen or coal substances added to pigments. This practice proved to be detrimental to the paint surface. Though a keen collector of old-master drawings, Reynolds himself was never a draftsman, and indeed few of his drawings have any merit whatsoever.
Reynolds' Discourses Delivered at the Royal Academy ( ) is among the most important art criticism of the time. In it he outlined the essence of grandeur in art and suggested the means of achieving it through rigorous academic training and study of the old masters of art.
George Clive and his Family with an Indian Maid 1765 Oil on canvas
Lady Cockburn
and her Three Eldest Sons 1773 Oil on canvas,

15. William Hogarth The Orgy c. 1735 Oil on canvas
HOGARTH, WilliamEnglish painter (b. 1697, London, d. 1764, London)
English painter and engraver. He trained as an engraver in the Rococo tradition, and by 1720 was established in London independently as an engraver on copper of billheads and book illustrations. In his spare time he studied painting, first at the St Martin's Lane Academy and later under Sir James Thornhill, whose daughter he married in By this time he had begun to make a name with small conversation pieces, and about 1730 he set up as a portrait painter. At about the same time he invented and popularized the use of a sequence of anecdotal pictures 'similar to representations on the stage' to point a moral and satirize social abuses. A Harlot's Progress (6 scenes, c. 1731; destroyed by fire) was followed by A Rake's Progress (8 scenes, Sir John Soane's Museum, London, c. 1735), and Marriage à la Mode (6 scenes, National Gallery, London, c. 1743), which each portray the punishment of vice in a somewhat lurid melodrama. Each series was painted with a view to being engraved, and the engravings had a wide sale and were popular with all classes. They were much pirated and Hogarth's campaigning against the profiteers led to the Copyright Act of 'I have endeavoured', he wrote, 'to treat my subjects as a dramatic writer: my picture is my stage, and men and women my players.'
Hogarth, however, was much more than a preacher in paint. His satire was directed as much at pedantry and affectation as at immorality, and he saw himself to some extent as a defender of native common sense against a fashion for French and Italian mannerisms. In spite of his rabid xenophobia, Hogarth made some attempts to show he could paint in the Italian Grand Manner (Sigismunda, Tate, London, 1759). These, however, are generally considered his weakest works, and apart from his modern morality subjects he excelled mainly in portraiture. Captain Coram (Coram Foundation, London, 1740), which he regarded as his highest achievement in portraiture, shows that he could paint a portrait in the Baroque manner with complete confidence and without artificiality. However, he could not flatter or compromise and had not the disposition for a successful portraitist. From 1735 to 1755 he ran an academy in St Martin's Lane (independent of the one at which he had studied), and this became the main forerunner of the Royal Academy. In 1753 he published The Analysis of Beauty, a treatise on aesthetic theory which he wrote with the conviction that the views of a practising artist should carry greater weight than the theories of the connoisseur or dilettante.
Hogarth was far and away the most important British artist of his generation. He was equally outstanding as a painter and engraver and by the force of his pugnacious personality as well as by the quality and originality of his work he freed British art from its domination by foreign artists. Because so much of his work has a 'literary' element, his qualities as a painter have often been overlooked, but his more informal pictures in particular show that his brushwork could live up to his inventive genius. The vigour and spontaneity of The Shrimp Girl (National Gallery, London, c. 1740), for example, have made it deservedly one of the most popular British paintings of the 18th century.
Soliciting Votes 1754 Oil on canvas,

16. Thomas Jefferson, architecture
“…a conscious rejection of the rococo and all it stood for in favor of the austere world…of ancient Rome”
Thomas Jefferson: The Education of an Architect
By Ralph Giordano
It is unlikely that most people upon hearing the name Thomas Jefferson, immediately think of architecture, yet his contributions as an architect are immeasurable. At the time of Jefferson’s birth in 1743, [1] no American school or college offered architectural training. Formal education offerings, during this era, were deeply rooted in the classics. In his early years, Jefferson learned from his father, Peter Jefferson, farming, surveying, and horsemanship. [2] At age nine he was sent to board in a small private school, where he was thoroughly indoctrinated as a correct classical scholar, first under the tutelage of the Reverend William Douglas, then with the Reverend James Maury. [3] By the time he was ready to enter college, Thomas Jefferson was well versed in Greek, French, Latin, Italian, and Spanish.
It is most likely that Jefferson’s interest in architecture began with his matriculation at the College of William and Mary in At that time he purchased his first book on architecture, probably Giacomo Leoni’s translated version of Four Books of Architecture by Andrea Palladio. [4] This would become the first work of his vast collection of books on architecture. Among the most significant were James Gibbs’ Book of Architecture & Rules for Drawing Orders, Vitruvius’ Ten Books of Architecture, and Robert Morris’ Select Architecture. [5]            
Very likely, Jefferson’s architectural awareness was also heightened by his personal contact with enlightened men of his time. He was soon to attract the attention of Dr. William Small a young professor at William and Mary. Jefferson described Dr. Small as “a man profound in most useful branches of science, with a happy talent of communications, correct and gentlemanly manners, and an enlarged and liberated mind.” [6] Dr. Small taught him mathematics and introduced him to scientific thought. Through this association Jefferson came to know George Wythe, considered to be not only the “finest Greek and Latin scholar” in the colonies but also a great teacher of law. [7]    Through these men, Jefferson came to know other distinguished Virginia gentlemen including Lieutenant Governor Fauquier, William Byrd, and John Page, among others.  Jefferson’s close association with these gentlemen in Williamsburg not only heightened his classical training; they enlightened his appreciation of the arts, fine wine, music, landscaped gardens, and science.
            Upon completing his course of studies at William and Mary in 1762, Jefferson embarked on a law career, studying for five years with George Wythe.  Wythe’s father-in-law was Richard Taliaferro, a  “gentleman architect” who was involved with numerous building designs in the Virginia-Tidewater region. [8]   It is not unlikely that during Jefferson’s long association with George Wythe that they had numerous discussions with Taliaferro on the subject of architecture.   
            At the time Jefferson first entertained ideas of designing a home for himself at Monticello, in 1767, there were few architectural resources in America from which to select. Architecture and the architectural profession, as we know it, did not exist in the colonies. The designs for buildings were usually selected from handbooks. Jefferson in his early years adhered to this tradition. The initial design for Monticello ( ) was derived from books. Perhaps this is the reason why some historians have portrayed Thomas Jefferson as a “gentlemen architect,” and nothing more.
            Jefferson was admitted to the bar in 1767, practicing until 1774 when the courts were closed due to the American Revolution.  During this period of his life he also served in the Virginia House of Burgesses, (1769 to 1774) and married Martha Wayles Skelton (January 1, 1772). [9]   Law placed emphasis on logic, precision, and historical precedent; a training which would be artfully applied in Jefferson’s efforts to delve into the past in order to discover the universal truths of classical architecture.  Jefferson was a perfectionist who maintained an obsession with compiling, listing, ordering, and observing.  He continually strove to find the perfect solution.  This ability to observe and record the often overlooked details, would serve him well in his later architectural studies of existing buildings and measured drawings.
            From the very beginning of his career, Jefferson regarded books as the ultimate source of knowledge.  In a letter to John Adams, Jefferson wrote, “I cannot live without books.” [10]   It was through books that Jefferson first discovered the world of architecture.  Architecture was a disciplined orderly world, governed by laws and principles—a world of tangible, measurable, repeatable relationships. Within the pages of these books, Jefferson found what he considered to be the elements of architecture—the classical orders, specifically within Four Books of Architecture.  He found these orders illustrated, proportioned, and praised by Andrea Palladio the great architectural theorist of the Renaissance.  Architecture had an immediate appeal to Jefferson’s probing methodical nature. [11]
            Jefferson took advantage of every opportunity to study architecture through his books and by travels to the Northeast.  In 1766, he and John Adams traveled north, stopping at Annapolis, Philadelphia, and New York.  Jefferson said of the architecture that he was impressed by the “extremely beautiful houses of Annapolis, but the public buildings were not “worth mentioning.” [12]
            The architectural environment of Virginia into which Thomas Jefferson was born apparently did not inspire him. The earliest comments on architecture are found in his Notes on the State of Virginia [13] (1782) in which he wrote:
The private buildings are very rarely constructed of stone or brick; … It is impossible to devise things more ugly, uncomfortable, and happily more perishable.  There are two or three plans, on one of which, according to its size, most of the houses in the state are built.  The poorest people build huts of logs, The only public buildings worthy [of] mention are the Capital, the Palace, the College, and the Hospital for Lunatics, all of them in Williamsburg.  The Capitol is a light and airy structure, with a portico in front of two orders, the lower of which, being Doric, is tolerably just in its proportions and ornaments, save only that the intercolonnations [sic] are too large The Palace is not handsome without The College and Hospital are rude, mis-shapen piles, which, but that they have roofs, would be taken for brick-kilns.  There are no other public buildings but churches and court-houses, in which no attempts are made at elegance. . . The genius of architecture seems to have shed its maledictions over this land. . . To give these symmetry and taste would not increase their cost.  It would only change the arrangement of the materials, the form and combination of the members.  This would often cost less than the burthen of barbarous [sic] ornaments with which these buildings are sometimes charged.  But the first principles of the art are unknown, and there exists scarcely a model among us sufficiently chaste to give an idea of them.  Architecture being one of the fine arts, and as such within the department of a professor of the college perhaps a park may fall on some young subjects of natural taste, kindle up their genius, and produce a reformation in this elegant and useful art. [14]
It is apparent that by the time Notes was written, he was astutely aware of architecture, although he probably had no way of knowing that he was yet to receive the “spark” which would cause him to “produce a reformation” of architecture in America.
            By 1767, when Jefferson first laid plans in designing his own home at Monticello, he had become a devoted Palladian. (Fig. 1). This is clearly illustrated in his own elevation drawing of Monticello. The two-tiered columned portico and strict symmetry are taken directly from the drawings within Palladio’s Four Books of Architecture. [15] Even though Jefferson’s early designs were derived in the same tradition of eighteenth century “gentlemen architects,” we do notice a striking contrast in the technical competence of his drawings.
            Jefferson’s later drawings are those of a highly skilled draftsman, and his scaled drawings are of a quality not found among his 18th century American contemporaries. [16] The drawings supplemented with written documents, which identified his sources and provided instructions for his workmen; the precursor for modern working drawings and specifications. For each finished drawing it is most likely that numerous preliminary sketches, were produced as evidenced by his “thumbnail” sketches of Monticello and the Capitol. (Fig. 2).  These drawings, along with his preliminary sketches, indicate that Jefferson resolved his problems on the drawing board. His uncanny draftsmanship provided him with the invaluable power to visualize and resolve the problems of spatial relationships in a way that would not be possible   by 18th century traditional methods. [17] This practice started Jefferson, is still used by American architects.
            In 1784, as a result of his appointment as minister to France, Jefferson had the fortunate opportunity to study architecture at a time when all of Europe paid homage to  the so-called “First School of Paris.” [18] Although busy with his official duties, Jefferson found time to absorb the varied pleasures, which could satisfy both his mind and spirit. He sampled widely the art, music, and theater available in Paris. He frequented bookstores and salons and viewed the beauties of French architecture. The five   years spent in France were considered to be among the happiest of his life.
            While in Europe, Jefferson seized the opportunity to study as much architecture as possible. While in France, Jefferson took every opportunity to study buildings firsthand. Jefferson’s  personal association with French visionary architects such as LeDoux, Boullee, and Clerisseau shoed him “the flexibility and logic of French rational planning.” [19]   Jefferson’s architectural judgment was based upon his republican ideas. His political attitudes led him in a search for a style, which would link the political independence of the new America with an appropriate architecture. [20]   He realized that the legacy of all great empires was epitomized through their architectural monuments. Jefferson’s visionary search for this ideal led him to tour the south of France to study the ancient Roman ruins. Among these ruins, of particular interest to Jefferson, was the Maison Carree at Nimes, which he described as the “most beautiful and precious morsel of architecture left us by antiquity.” [21] The Maison Carree at Nimes would influence his design for the state capital of Virginia. As a result, he never again saw architecture as a tool, which could solely be derived from books.
            Jefferson was also drawn to the  appeal of the domestic houses. The French emphasized comfort, privacy, and Roman classicism. [22] One house in particular, which he greatly admired, was the Hotel de Salm in Paris. Jefferson said of this building, “I was violently smitten with the Hotel de Salm, and used to go to the Tuileries almost daily to look at it.” He further stated, “all the new and good houses appear to be of a single story. That is of a height of 16 to 18 feet and the whole of it given to rooms of entertainment, but in the parts where there are bedrooms they have two tiers of them from 8 to 10 feet high each.” [23] The Hotel de Salm was one of many buildings, which influenced his architectural ideas. The concept learned at the Hotel de Salm, however, would be translated in his remodeling of Monticello.
            In terms   of Jefferson’s architectural development, perhaps the most influential of all the buildings was the Hotel de Langeac. Jefferson  leased this house and spent four of his five European years living there. Within the building he not only enjoyed the amenities of a new architecture, he lived it. Langeac taught him a number of architectural lessons, which he would incorporate into Monticello, among them the use of skylights to adequately illuminate interior windowless rooms and the realization that the skylights could be made weather tight. [24]
            Another architectural lesson learned in France was a result of a love affair in Maria Cosway was a married woman with whom the widower Jefferson was completely infatuated from the first moment they met. Undecided on how to convey his love for Maria, Jefferson decided to express his thoughts in a letter. The result is considered to be one of the most famous love letters ever written. Historians have termed it the “Heart and Heart” letter. [25] In it, Jefferson narrated a dialogue, which took place between his head and his heart. The heart expresses his admiration for Maria yet his head reprimands the heart and proceeds to lecture his heart on the superiority of intellectual over physical pleasure. The brilliance in this letter lies in Jefferson’s creative interplay between the head and the heart without himself giving in to either reason or to love. Jefferson was quick to understand that a lasting relationship with Maria Cosway could never be. In his summation, Jefferson was being honest with himself. [26] One can clearly observe Jefferson’s application of this dialogue of the head and the heart in his architecture. In subsequent designs, such as at Monticello, the University of Virginia, and Popular Forest, to name a few, he tested his theories and ideas through an exercise in dialogue between the rational requirements of a building and the sensory needs of the inhabitants. [27]
            Upon his return to Virginia, Jefferson was able to combine rational thought and heartfelt sensitivity into his architectural designs. He began by remodeling Monticello ( ), continually experimenting and testing new ideas in his “architectural laboratory” for the rest of his life. In Monticello, he attained the delicate balance between the pragmatic and the aesthetic, a blending that he would incorporate into all his architecture. (Fig. 3).
            As a consequence of Jefferson’s study of Roman architecture there was a  reversal in his reverence towards Palladio. As previously stated, prior to 1784 Jefferson was a devoted follower. He would slavishly copy details and plans. During his years in France, however, Jefferson  came to realize that the original inspiration for Palladio’s ideas came from ancient Rome. Once Jefferson studied the same sources and discovered his mentor’s fountainhead, Palladio’s role shifted from mentor to that of fellow classicist. Henceforth, Palladio’s and all of Jefferson’s architectural books would serve as reference guides to be consulted – not copied.
            Paris was the culmination of Thomas Jefferson’s education in architecture. His architectural ideas took on a new focus. His strict adherence to the allusion to ancient Rome and his knowledge of the classics placed him within a small circle of leaders of the neo-classical movement of the late 18th century.  His European experiences provided the “spark” that transformed him from the mere gentleman architect of his early years into a vigorous leader of the neo-classical movement in America. The Thomas Jefferson who sailed home in 1789 was a true architect.
Virginia State Capitol
Thomas Jefferson
“…a conscious rejection of the rococo and all it stood for in favor of the austere world…of ancient Rome”

17. Music in the eighteenth century:
Haydn and Mozart In music the emotional style of baroque composers began to give way to a new way of organizing musical forms. By the middle of the eighteenth century the classical style was beginning to evolve, and the two greatest composers of the age, Franz Joseph Haydn and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (both Austrian), used it to write their symphonies, concertos, and sonatas. Most of these works employed sonata form, a system of musical composition involving contrasts rather than the unity of baroque music. Haydn's hundred or so symphonies show an almost infinitely endless exploration of the possibilities offered by sonata form while also reflecting the evolution of the modern symphony orchestra. His own personal career furthermore illustrates the changing status of the artist: After years of serving in the household of an aristocratic family, he became transformed by his compositions into one of the most famous men in Europe.
Mozart's relations with his noble employers were far less happy. His music, however, transcends the difficulties of his life and achieves the supreme blend of eighteenth-century art's two chief concerns: beauty and learning. Like Haydn, he explored the possibilities of sonata form and also wrote a number of operas that remain among the best-loved of all musical works for the stage. The Marriage of Figaro illustrates Mozart's genius for expressing universal human emotions in music, while in its story it reflects the revolutionary mood of the times.

18. Eighteenth-Century Literature
History and Satire Like music, the literature of the eighteenth century was generally serious. Many writers avoided the lightness of the rococo, preferring to produce works based on classical models or themes. They included the Italian dramatist Metastasio and the English historian Edward Gibbon. An exception is provided by the satirical writings of Alexander Pope, which poke fun at the pretensions of eighteenth-century society, although many of Pope's other works are neoclassical in style. Other writers used satire, in itself a characteristically rococo medium, as a more bitter weapon against human folly. Jonathan Swift's writings present an indictment of his fellow humans that offers little hope for their improvement.
Alexander Pope ( )
English essayist, critic, satirist, and one of the greatest poets of Enlightenment. Pope wrote his first verses at the age of 12. His breakthrough work, AN ESSAY ON CRITICISM (1711), appeared when he was twenty-three. It included the famous line "a little learning is a dangerous thing." Pope's physical defects made him an easy target for heartless mockery, but he was also considered a leading literary critic and the epitome of English Neoclassicism.
"Whoever thinks a faultless piece to see, Thinks what ne'er was, nor is, nor e'er shall be." (from An Essay on Criticism) Alexander Pope was born in London as the son of Alexander Pope, a Roman Catholic linen-merchant, and Edith (Turner) Pope, who was forty-four when Alexander, her only child, was born. Edith Pope belonged to a large Yorkshire family, which divided along Catholic and Protestant lines. His early years Pope spent at Binfield on the edge of Windsor Forest, and recalled this period as a golden age: "Thy forests, Windsor, and thy green retreats, / At once the monarch's and the Muse's seats, / Invite my lays. Be present, sylvan maids! Unlock your springs, and open all your shades." Anecdotes from Pope's life were deemed worthy of collecting during his lifetime. Joseph Spence, a critic, minor poet, and Pope's biographer, tells that Pope was "a child of a particularly sweet temper and had a great deal of sweetness in his look when he was a boy".
Pope's father, the son of an Anglican vicar, had converted to Catholicism, which caused the family many problems. At that time Catholics suffered from repressive legislation and prejudices - they were not allowed to enter any universities or held public employment. Thus Pope had an uneven education, which was often interrupted. At home, Pope's aunt taught him to read. Latin and Greek he learned from a local priest and later he acquired knowledge of French and Italian poetry. Pope also attended clandestine Catholic schools.
Most of his time Pope spend reading books from his father's library - he "did nothing but write and read," said later his half-sister. While still at school, Pope wrote a play based on speeches from the Iliad. In 1700, when his family moved to Binfield in Windsor Forest, Pope contracted tuberculosis through infected milk. It was probably Pott's disease, a tubercular affection of the spine. He also suffered from asthma and headaches, and his humpback was a constant target for his critics in literary battles - Pope was called a 'hunchbacked toad.' In middle age he was 4ft 6in tall and wore a stiffened canvas bodice to support his spine.
After moving to London, Pope published his first major work, An Essay on Criticism. This discussion was based on neoclassical doctrines and derived standards of taste from the order of nature: "Good nature and good sense must ever join; / To err is human, to forgive divine." Pope associated with anti-Catholic Whig friends, but by 1713 he moved towards the Tories, becoming one of the members of Scriblerus Club. His friends among Tory intellectuals included Jonathan Switft, Gay, Congreve, and Robert Harley, 1st Earl of Oxford. In 1712 Pope published an early version of THE RAPE OF THE LOCK, an elegant satire about the battle between the sexes, and follies of a young woman with her "puffs, powders, patches, Bibles, billet-doux". The work was expanded in Its first version consisted of two cantos (1712) and the final version five cantos (1714). Rape of the Lock originated from a quarrel between two families with whom Pope was acquainted. The cause was not very small - Lord Petre cut off a lock of Miss Arabella Fermor's hair.
Pope's poem recounts the story of a young woman, Belinda. When she wakes up, Pope describes devotedly her exotic cosmetics and beauty aids. She plays cards, flirts, drinks coffee, and has a lock of hair stolen by an ardent young man. "The meeting points the sacred hair dissever / From the fair head, forever, and forever! / The flashed the living lightning from her eyes, / And screams of horror rend th' affrighted skies." Pope gives this trivial event an extended mock heroic treatment, and at the same time comments ironically on the contemporary social world, high-society preoccupations, and perhaps suggests a reform.
Pope's admired Horace and Vergilius and valued them as models for poetry. His great achievements was the translations of Iliad and Odyssey into English. The success of Pope's translations enabled him to move to Twickenham from anti-Catholic pressure of the Jacobites. However, Pope remained a Catholic even after the death of his father (d. 1717) and mother (d. 1733). Pope's collected works were published in He was one of the first professional poets to be self-sufficient as a result of his non-dramatic writings.
In Twickenham Pope to studied horticulture and landscape gardening. During his last years, Pope designed a romantic 'grot' in a tunnel, which linked the waterfront with his back garden. It was walled with shells and pieces of mirror. Pope's villa, about fifteen miles from London, attracted also a number of writers, including Swift, whom Pope helped with the publication of Gulliver's Travels. With his neighbor, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Pope formed an attachment, but when the friendship cooled down, he started a life long relationship with Martha Blount. Pope had met Martha and her sister Teresa already in Later in IMITATIONS OF HORACE (1733) Pope referred to his former friend Lady Mary as "Sappho" and wrote: "Give me again my hollow tree, / A crust of bread, and liberty."
In ESSAY ON MAN ( ) Pope examined the human condition against Miltonic, cosmic background. Although Pope's perspective is well above our everyday life, and he do not hide his wide knowledge, the dramatic work suggest than humankind is a part of nature and the diversity of living forms: "Each beast, each insect, happy in its own: / Is Heaven unkind to Man, and Man alone?" In MORAL ESSAYS (1731) Pope separated behavior from character: "Not always actions show the man: we find / Who does a kindness is not therefore kind." Pope prepared an edition of his correspondence, doctored to his own advantage. He also employed discreditable artifices to make it appear that the correspondence was published against his wish. With the translation of the Odyssey, Pope was eager to take all the credit, trying to avoid mentioning the contribution of other writers.
In his time Pope was famous for his witty satires and aggressive, bitter quarrels with other writers. When his edition of William Shakespeare was attacked, he answered with the savage burlesque THE DUNCIAD (1728), which was widened in It ridiculed bad writers, scientists, and critics. "While pensive poets painful vigils keep, / Sleepless themselves to give their readers sleep." Pope died on May 30, He left his property to Martha Blount. With the growth of Romanticism Pope's poetry was increasingly seen as outdated and the 'Age of Pope' ended. It was not until the 1930s when serious attempt was made to rediscover the poet's work.
Jonathan Swift
Jonathan 'Isaac Bickerstaff' Swift
( )
Jonathan Swift was born in Dublin, Ireland on 30 November 1667, second child and only son of Jonathan Swift1 and Abigaile Erick Swift. His father was dead before Jonathan, Junior was born, so the child's education was arranged by other relatives. Jonathan graduated from Trinity College, Dublin, in and then went to England to try his luck. He found a job as secretary to Sir William Temple, and it was in Sir William's household that he met Esther (Stella) Johnson3 and became her tutor. Now Sir William was an extremely important statesman of the day. He helped arrange the marriage of future British monarchs William and Mary4.
Anyway, Jonathan wrote a lot of stuff in between tutoring sessions, but unfortunately burned most of it. The writing that survives shows signs of the great satirist he was to become. But when Sir William died in 1699, Jonathan was left scrambling for a job and eventually ended up with several odd little Church positions5 back in Ireland6. He became a very fashionable satiric writer as far as Dublin society was concerned7.
And now for one of my all-time favorite anecdotes. In the early 1700's, a man named John Partridge, a cobler by trade, took up printing almanacs to make some extra money. He challenged his readers to try their hands at prophecy and see if they could beat Partridge's own prophetic abilities. Well, Partridge had made some attacks on the Church of England, and in 1708, Jonathan decided to stand up for his employer. Using the name Isaac Bickerstaff8, he prophesied "a trifle...[Partridge] will infallibly die upon the 29th of March next, about eleven at Night, of a raging fever." At the proper time, using another name, Jonathan announced the fulfillment of said prophecy9. Partridge, in his next almanac, protested loudly that he was still alive, but no one believed him. The Stationer's Register had already removed his name from their rolls, and that was good enough for most people10.
Somewhere around 1716, some biographers say he married Stella Johnson, but there's no proof of this, and you'd think there'd be some sign if he had. Though they lived near each other for most of their lives, they were always very properly chaperoned and may very well have never been alone together11.
Gulliver's Travels was published in 1726, Jonathan's first big dive into prose. Though it's been pretty solidly labeled a children's book, it's also a great satire of the times that is pretty much beyond most children. It shows Jonathan's desire to encourage people to read deeper and not take things for granted: readers who paid attention could match all of Gulliver's tall tales with current events and long-term societal problems. In 1729, Jonathan wrote one of my favorites, A Modest Proposal, supposedly written by an intelligent and objective "political arithmetician" who had carefully studied Ireland before making his proposal. Most of you probably know this one. The author calmly suggests one solution for both the problem of overpopulation and the growing numbers of undernourished people: breed those children who would otherwise go hungry or be mistreated in order to feed the general public12.
Jonathan died on 19 October 1745, aged 78. He hadn't been in a good frame of mind for some time13. He managed to keep some of his sense of humor, though--his last will and testament provided funds to establish somewhere around Dublin a hospital for "ideots & lunaticks" because "No Nation wanted [needed] it so much."

19. The Encyclopedists
The French Encyclopedists offered a more optimistic point of view. Denis Diderot and most of his colleagues believed in the essential goodness of human nature and the possibility of progress, and their EncyclopÈdie was intended to exalt the power of reason. Not all the contributors agreed, however. Jean Jacques Rousseau claimed that society was an evil that corrupted essential human goodness and called for a new social order. Yet all the leading intellectuals of the day, including the greatest of them all, Voltaire, were united in urging the need for radical social change. In novels, pamphlets, plays, and countless other publications Voltaire attacked traditional religion and urged the importance of freedom of thought.

20. American Revolution: 1775 - 1783
Battles for Freedom
By the end of the century the battle for freedom had plunged France into chaos and demonstrated to the whole of Europe that the old social order had come to an end. The following century was to see the struggle to forge a new society.
French Revolution:
American Revolution:
French Revolution:
The period of the French Revolution in the history of France covers the years between 1789 and 1799, in which democrats and republicans overthrew the absolute monarchy and the Roman Catholic Church perforce underwent radical restructuring. While France would oscillate among republic, empire, and monarchy for 75 years after the First Republic fell to a coup by Napoleon Bonaparte, the revolution nonetheless spelled a definitive end to the ancien régime, and eclipses all subsequent revolutions in France in the popular imagination.
American Revolution:
The American Revolution is the series of events and ideas that resulted in the separation of 13 colonies in North America from Great Britain and their transformation into the United States of America.
The revolution included the direct military struggles known as the American Revolutionary War. The War itself started with the Battle of Lexington and Concord on April 19, 1775 and ended with the Treaty of Paris in 1783.