THE HISTORICAL ANALYSIS of the relations between eighteenth-century art and eighteenth-century society is not yet in a satisfactory state, although things are improving. Recent monographs by Georges Wildenstein, for example, avoid the old generalities about art and culture, and the severe but exhilarating scholarship of the Warburg circle and their allies—of scholars like Rudolf Wittkower, Sir Kenneth Clark, Nikolaus Pevsner, Sir Anthony Blunt—though mainly concentrated on the art of the Renaissance and on the seventeenth century, has had beneficial effects on eighteenth-century studies as well. I am, as so often, indebted to Herbert Dieckmann, notably to his long essay, Esthetic Theory and Criticism in the Enlightenment: Some Examples of Modern Trends (1965); it offers some judicious criticisms of scholars like W. Folkierski and Margaret Gilman, who treat the eighteenth century mainly as a transition between classicism and romanticism. Walter Jackson Bate’s little book on “Premises of Taste in Eighteenth Century England” (cited above, 630), is even called From Classic to Romantic. Good as such studies are (and Bate’s opening chapters on English neoclassicism are excellent) they give too little credit to the inner, autonomous qualities of eighteenth-century aesthetic thinking, which, though it moved away from neoclassicism, was by no means a mere prelude to or precursor of romanticism.
Inevitably, thinking about eighteenth-century art leads into general aesthetics. The field, as aestheticians have long complained, is a swamp. (J. A. Passmore’s astringent essay “The Dreariness of Aesthetics,” in Aesthetics and Language, ed. William Elton [1954], 36–55, is only one example. Indeed, Elton’s whole volume is a collective assault of disenchanted linguistic philosophers on modern aesthetic theorizing—negative but far from useless.) The list that follows is a sampling of the works I have consulted. I have learned from Albert Hofstadter’s difficult essay, Truth and Art (1965), which surveys the aesthetic theories dominant in our time (notably the ideas of Cassirer, Croce, Collingwood, Maritain, and Heidegger), to arrive at a personal statement. (See also Hofstadter: “Validity versus Value: An Essay in Philosophical Aesthetics,” The Journal of Philosophy, LIX, 21 [October 11, 1962], 607–17, and “Art and Spiritual Validity,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, XXII, 1 [Fall 1963], 9–19.) John Dewey: Art as Experience (1934) remains an indispensable statement of experimentalism in art; Susanne K. Langer: Feeling and Form: A Theory of Art (1935) develops Cassirer’s ideas. E. H. Gombrich: “Meditations on a Hobby Horse or the Roots of Artistic Form” (originally in Aspects of Form, ed. L. L. Whyte [1951]), now in Gombrich: Meditations on a Hobby Horse and Other Essays on the Theory of Art (1936), 1–11, is a brilliant short study of the work of perception in aesthetic judgment. Other essays in this collection worthy of special note are “Visual Metaphors of Value in Art,” 12–29, and “Expression and Communication,” 56–69, although the other essays, not mentioned here, are just as interesting. Gombrich’s Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (2d edn., 1965) is a long and eminently suggestive essay in the psychology of art. Among general treatises, I found Monroe Beardsley: Aesthetics (1958), most satisfactory. On style, on which Gombrich has also much to say, the well-known essay by Meyer Schapiro, “Style” (originally in Anthropology Today, ed. A. L. Kroeber, now conveniently reprinted in Aesthetics Today, ed. Morris Philipson [1961], 81–113), is indispensable.
A word on Marxist interpretations of art history. Leo Balet: Die Verbürgerlichung der deutschen Kunst, Musik und Literatur im 18. Jahrhundert (1936); Arnold Hauser’s extremely well-known volumes, The Social History of Art, 2 vols. (tr. Stanley Godman and the author, 1951); and Frederick Antal’s learned and often brilliant essays, Hogarth and His Place in European Art (1962) and Classicism and Romanticism, with Other Studies in Art History (1966), have gained wide influence, in part because they are so stimulating, in part because the field they have dealt with is still relatively unexplored. Perhaps Antal’s most interesting disciple was the English sociologist F. D. Klingender, whose best two books, Art and the Industrial Revolution (1947) and Goya in the Democratic Tradition (1948), both attempts at a social history of art, repay reading. Gombrich’s incisive criticism of Hauser, “The Social History of Art” (1953), now in Meditations on a Hobby Horse (just cited), 86–94, is worth reading. Marxist history of art is simplistic and often distorted; it sees early modern Europe, and its art, as a spectacle in which the “middle class” rises at the expense of the aristocracy. In the minds of these scholars, art displays the triumph of bourgeois ideology. But this is manifestly wrong: courtly art continues; “bourgeois” art like, say, Chardin’s still lifes finds aristocratic customers; society, and with it the world of art patrons, continues to be subdivided among landed gentry, urban aristocrats, ecclesiastics, professionals, and a handful of merchants. Much work, to be sure, remains to be done; subtle Marxists might, after all, argue that the processes they claim to see go on behind the backs of the actors. But the grand simplicities, even of a learned and scholarly writer like Antal, suggest that Marxism, far from aiding, frequently obstructs, the view of the social historian of art. (See also below, sections 2 and 3 of this chapter.)
The taste of the philosophes needs much further exploration, although on their taste in literature the relevant chapters of Wellek: History of Modern Criticism, I (see above, 630), are adequate. For Kant, see A. D. Lindsay: Kant, 237. In addition, see Ernst Cassirer: Kants Leben und Lehre, passim; René Wellek: Aesthetics and Criticism,” in C. W. Hendel, ed.: The Philosophy of Kant and Our Modern World, 65–7; and Erich Adickes: “Kant als Aesthetiker,” Jahrbuch des freien deutschen Hochstifts (1904), 315–38, esp. 320–8. Voltaire’s taste has been studied in detail by Raymond Naves, in Le goût de Voltaire (1938), although, for all its merits, the book does not exhaust its subject. See also the perceptive pages in Gustave Lanson: Voltaire (1906; tr. Robert A. Wagoner, 1966), 75–92, which rightly stress the radicalism of Voltaire’s theatrical experiments, a radicalism that frightened many of his contemporaries. The literature on Shakespeare and Voltaire is constantly growing; I have used Thomas R. Lounsbury: Shakespeare and Voltaire (1902), dated and oversimple, F. C. Green: Minuet (1935), which is much better, as well as Jacques Guicharnaud: “Voltaire and Shakespeare,” American Society Legion of Honor Magazine, XXVII (1956), 159–69, a helpful summary, and Henning Fenger: “Voltaire et le théâtre anglais,” Orbis Litterarum, VII (1949), 161–287.
Handel has most recently been thoroughly examined by Paul Henry Lang, in George Frideric Handel (1966); chaps. xiii, xiv, xix, and xxii—on Handel’s Messiah, his secular pagan oratorios, and his religious convictions—chapters which effectively polemicize against the religious interpretation of Handel, were especially instructive to me. For Goya, see above, 626.
The revival of Gothic in the eighteenth century, a complicated story of resistance and adaptation to modernity, is thoroughly investigated in Paul Frankl: The Gothic: Literary Sources and Interpretations Through Eight Centuries (1960), especially 370–414, with full bibliographies (the monographs most relevant here are listed on 371). While Frankl’s treatment is full, it is not exhaustive—the citations in the text, for example, came out of my own reading. Sir Kenneth Clark’s The Gothic Revival (1928; latest edn., 1962), is, not unexpectedly, both amusing and informative. René Lanson: Le goût du moyen age en France au XVIIIe siècle (1926) is of some help but generally shallow. Arthur Johnston: Enchanted Ground: The Study of Medieval Romance in the Eighteenth Century (1964) and W. D. Robson-Scott: The Literary Background of the Gothic Revival in Germany: A Chapter in the History of Taste (1965) are—the latter with especially full bibliography—both excellent on the literary revival in their respective countries. Hermann Schmitz: Die Gotik im deutschen Kunst- und Geistesleben (1921) broadly sweeps from Gothic to neo-Gothic. René Wellek: Rise of English Literary History (above, 630), has important chapters on eighteenth-century views of medieval literature. Wellek’s counterpart for Germany is Sigmund von Lempicki: Geschichte der deutschen Literaturwissenschaft bis zum Ende des 18. Jahrhunderts (1920), notably part II. For trivial Gothicizing taste, see Osbert Sitwell and Margaret Barton: “Taste,” Johnson’s England, II, 36–7, and the interesting pamphlet by Oliver Sigwart: The Four Styles of a Decade (1740–1750), (1960), which deals with Gothic as one of four options open to Englishmen; it also has good material on Hogarth. (I also refer the reader to I, 489–92, where some of these titles, and others, are cited.)
The eighteenth century was the first to put both art criticism and literary criticism on a modern footing. The fundamental paper on this question is the richly documented survey by Paul Oskar Kristeller: “The Modern System of the Arts: A Study in the History of Aesthetics,” JHI, XII, 4 (October 1951), 296–327; and ibid., XIII, 1 (January 1952), 17–46. There are many histories of aesthetics; Katharine E. Gilbert and Helmut Kuhn: A History of Esthetics (edn. 1953) is a useful though not profound survey. Julius Schlosser: Die Kunstliteratur (1924) is a widely appreciated classic. A. Dresdner: Die Kunstkritik: Ihre Geschichte und Theorie, I, Die Entstehung der Kunstkritik (1915, all that appeared), [I, 486], is, on the other hand, a relatively neglected classic—I am especially in debt to Dresdner. K. Heinrich von Stein: Die Entstehung der neueren Aesthetik (1886) retains its use despite its age. Wladyslaw Folkierski: Entre le classicisme et le romantisme. Étude sur l’esthétique et les esthéticiens du XVIIIe siècle (1925) remains unsurpassed despite the tendentiousness Dieckmann has criticized. And, once again, Cassirer: Philosophy of the Enlightenment: his chapter on aesthetics, the last and longest in the book, is nothing less than magnificent.
The theme of the decline of neoclassical art theory runs through this whole chapter. For the definition of neoclassicism, see René Bray: La formation de la doctrine classique en France (1927; edn. 1951), which deals mainly with seventeenth-century France; it should be supplemented with Borgerhoff: The Freedom of French Classicism (see above, 626), which, in contrast, stresses freedom, “magic,” and je ne sais quoi. Erwin Panofsky: Idea: Ein Beitrag zur Begriffsgeschichte der älteren Kunsttheorie (2d edn., 1960), takes the idea of “Idea,” central to Platonic idealism and its offshoots, from antiquity to the Renaissance; it is immensely compressed and immensely learned. Henri Peyre: Le classicisme français (1942) is a good essay in definition, with historical notes on the uses of the term “classic” [see, for all these titles, I, 425, 528]. Short but clear and instructive is René Wellek’s chapter “Neoclassicism and the New Trends of the Time,” in his History of Modern Criticism, I. See also Wellek: “The Term and Concept of ‘Classicism’ in Literary History,” in Aspects of the Eighteenth Century, ed. Earl R. Wasserman, 105–28, a diligent listing with exhaustive bibliographical indications. Henry Hawley has edited a well-illustrated and thoroughly annotated catalogue of an exhibition at the Cleveland Museum of Art: Neo-Classicism: Style and Motif (1964), with a stimulating though in some respects old-fashioned essay on “Neo-Classicism: Virtue, Reason and Nature,” by Rémy G. Saisselin. The classical ideas of genre and separation of styles as they are treated in Western realism have been superbly accounted for in Erich Auerbach: Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (1946; tr. Willard R. Trask, 1953) [I, 426]. Rudolf Wittkower’s paper, “Imitation, Eclecticism, and Genius,” in Aspects of the Eighteenth Century, 143–61, is an important survey of leading neoclassical ideas and their fate in the age of the Enlightenment. Edgar Wind has written a stimulating chapter on “The Fear of Knowledge,” which deals with the neoclassical idea of didactic art, in his Art and Anarchy. Much interesting material on didactic neoclassicism in English poetry is offered in Ulrich Broich: “Das Lehrgedicht als Teil der epischen Tradition des englischen Klassizismus,” Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift, N.F. XIII, 2 (April 1963), 147–63. Sutherland: Preface to XVIIIth Century Poetry (above, 626), is particularly informative on the flexibility of neoclassical rules (146 ff.). James William Johnson: The Formation of English Neo-Classical Thought (1967) deals instructively with the ancient world and its reception in eighteenth-century England, and culminates in Gibbon. It has a useful bibliography as well. It may be supplemented with A. F. B. Clark: Boileau and French Classical Critics in England, 1660–1830 (1925). But this gets us from neoclassicism into the reception of the classics in the modern world, a related but not identical theme. I have dealt with this reception in detail in my Rise of Modern Paganism. The deservedly famous essay by Rensselaer W. Lee: “Ut pictura poesis: The Humanistic Theory of Painting,” The Art Bulletin, XXII, 4 (December 1940), 197–269, goes far beyond its title; it is enormously informative on the whole spectrum of neoclassical theorizing.
For the neoclassical revival at the end of the century (to which I return in the third section of this chapter) see Fritz Novotny: Painting and Sculpture in Europe, 1780–1880 (tr. R. H. Boothroyd, 1960), especially chaps. i to v (its bibliography is exemplary). See also Rudolf Zeitler: Klassizismus und Utopia: Interpretationen zu Werken von David, Canova, Carstens, Thorvaldsen, Koch (1954); Sigfried Giedion: Spätbarocker und romantischer Klassizismus (1922); Louis Hautecœur: Rome et la renaissance de l’antiquité à la fin du XVIIIe siècle (1912); and Harry Levin: The Broken Column: A Study in Romantic Hellenism (1931). Robert Rosenblum’s conspectus of painting, sculpture, and architecture at the end of the eighteenth century, Transformations in Late Eighteenth Century Art (1967), is a pioneering set of essays, still tentative, but most stimulating, especially on the survival of moralizing tendencies; its illustrations are brilliantly chosen and its footnotes a mine of bibliographical information. Related developments are discussed in J. G. Robertson: Studies in the Genesis of Romantic Theory in the Eighteenth Century (1923), and G. McKenzie: Critical Responsiveness: A Study of the Psychological Current in Later 18th Century Criticism (1949). Two final notes. Neoclassicism is, of course, a leading theme in many books on specific arts, artists, or countries to be cited below. And the end of neoclassicism will be the main theme of chap. vi, section 2.
The history of patronage is still very incomplete; there are frequent references to it, of course, in histories of art and books on taste, although the latter are often merely chatty. Geraldine Pelles: Art, Artists and Society: Origins of a Modern Dilemma. Painting in England and France, 1750–1850 (1963), is a stimulating essay. A model for all others, clear, beautifully organized and argued, is Francis Haskell: Patrons and Painters: A Study in the Relations between Italian Art and Society in the Age of the Baroque (1963). It should be read (since it is mainly on the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries) in conjunction with Rudolf Wittkower: Art and Architecture in Italy: 1600–1750 (edn. 1965), a splendid survey. One remarkable essay, inviting further work, on the sociology of architects, is Nicolaus Pevsner: “Zur Geschichte des Architektenberufs,” Kritische Berichte zur Kunstgeschichtlichen Literatur, III, 4 (1930–1), 97–122. Chaps. iv to vii of Frank Jenkins’s Architect and Patron: A Survey of Professional Relations and Practice in England from the Sixteenth Century to the Present Day (1961) contain much of interest.
For the rise of artistic individualism there is much in Vasari’s Lives (I used the edn. by William Gaunt, 4 vols. [1963]). A general study (introductory and rather anecdotal), characterized by its authors as a “documented history from antiquity to the French Revolution” on the “character and conduct of artists” is Rudolf and Margot Wittkower: Born Under Saturn (1963). See also Rudolf Wittkower: “Individualism in Art and Artists: A Renaissance Problem,” JHI, XXII, 3 (July–September 1961), 291–302, which is short but revealing [both I, 513].
One subject that deserves far more research than it has received is the growth of the museum—largely an eighteenth-century phenomenon. There are some details in Dresdner, while Georg Friedrich Koch: Die Kunstausstellung, Ihre Geschichte von den Anfängen bis zum Ausgang des 18. Jahrhunderts (1967) has much fascinating material on exhibitions down to the beginning of the nineteenth century.
Among representative seventeenth-century artists wrestling with the problem of patronage, the outstanding ones are Rembrandt, Rubens, Bernini, and Poussin. On Rembrandt, the bibliography is by now almost unmanageable. See above all the general survey, which places him in his culture, by Jakob Rosenberg, Seymour Slive, E. H. ter Kuile: Dutch Art and Architecture: 1600–1800 (1966); its text is judicious and its bibliographies (like all the bibliographies in the Pelican History of Art) are exemplary. Jakob Rosenberg: Rembrandt, 2 vols. (2d edn., 1964) is indispensable; for Rembrandt’s possible borrowing from Italian sources, see the stimulating though essentially speculative essay by Sir Kenneth Clark: Rembrandt and the Italian Renaissance (1966). For Rubens, see H. Gerson and E. H. ter Kuile: Art and Architecture in Belgium: 1600–1800 (tr. Olive Renier, 1960), chap. v, with splendid bibliographical indications. Bernini has been fortunate in his biographers: there is Rudolf Wittkower: Gian Lorenzo Bernini: The Sculptor of the Roman Baroque (2d edn., 1966), Howard Hibbard’s recent crisp and excellent Bernini (1965), and Wittkower’s fine brief treatment in his Art and Architecture in Italy, 96–129. Sir Anthony Blunt has made Poussin his special subject; he deals with him briefly and brilliantly in Art and Architecture in France: 1500 to 1700 (1953); and now exhaustively and definitely in Nicolas Poussin, 2 vols. (1967).
Anne Betty Weinshenker: Falconet is a model monograph from which I have quoted freely. See also Herbert Dieckmann and Jean Seznec: “The Horse of Marcus Aurelius,” both cited above, 604; Seznec: “Falconet, Voltaire et Diderot,” VS, II (1956), 43–59; and Louis Réau: Étienne-Maurice Falconet, 2 vols. (1922).
The basic work on academies is Nikolaus Pevsner: Academies of Art Past and Present (1940), which begins with the liberation of academies from gilds and has excellent material on the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (including the dependence and poverty of the Dutch painters). With patronage, as with artists, I naturally have chosen only a few striking instances. I derived the passage on Dr. Mead’s collection from the informative essay by Osbert Sitwell and Margaret Barton, “Taste,” in Johnson’s England, II, 1–40, especially 19–20. For an interesting discussion of the taste of a great English patron in the age of the Enlightenment, Sir Robert Walpole, see especially J. H. Plumb: “The Walpoles, Father and Son,” in his Men and Centuries (1963), 136–43, and Plumb: Sir Robert Walpole: The King’s Minister, 81–7. G. E. Mingay: English Landed Society in the Eighteenth Century (see above, 574), has a valuable brief chapter (ix) on the taste of the landed gentry. The career of Tiepolo is well surveyed in Antonio Morassi: Tiepolo: His Life and Work (1955). Among the large literature on Haydn I found particularly useful Karl Geiringer: Haydn: A Creative Life in Music (2d edn., 1963); and see also his “Joseph Haydn, Protagonist of the Enlightenment,” VS, XXV (1963), 683–90. The sociology of Baroque music in general is discussed in Manfred F. Bukofzer: Music in the Baroque Era from Monteverdi to Bach (1947), chap. xii, “Sociology of Baroque Music,” which is only an introduction, but a helpful one. In general, Paul Henry Lang’s pioneering Music in Western Civilization (1941) remains a splendid general orientation. Alfred Einstein: Gluck (tr. Eric Blom, 1936) deals with Gluck’s reform of the opera in accord with enlightened principles. Edward E. Lowinsky: “Taste, Style, and Ideology in Eighteenth-Century Music,” in Aspects of the Eighteenth Century, 163–205, seeks to connect Bach with Leibniz, Rousseau with Gluck, Rousseau the composer with Rousseau the philosophe; it is a daring, though not, I think, convincing, venture. (For details on arts and the artists, see section 3, below, and chap. vi.)
Gerald Reitlinger: The Economics of Taste: The Rise and Fall of the Picture Market, 1760–1960 (1961) is filled with fascinating statistics that tell us much about the fashions in pictorial art in the age of the Enlightenment.
The literature on eighteenth-century English art is of course vast. Nikolaus Pevsner: The Englishness of English Art (rev. edn., 1964) provides excellent and amusing guidelines; it has a chapter each on Hogarth and Reynolds. A very short but informative survey down to 1760 is in Basil Williams: The Whig Supremacy: 1714–1760 (1939), chap. xv, “The Arts.” John Loftis: Comedy and Society from Congreve to Fielding (1959) and his The Politics of Drama in Augustan England (1963) are both fairminded essays that seek to link events on the stage to the political life of Walpole’s England. The dependence of English artists and art lovers on foreign, especially Italian, art has been thoroughly studied and is mentioned in all the major biographies and surveys; clearly, Hogarth’s claim to independence from foreign models cannot stand—even for him. In general see Rudolf Wittkower and Fritz Saxl: British Art and the Mediterranean (1948); J. R. Hale: England and the Italian Renaissance: The Growth of Interest in its History and Art (1954); Mario Praz: The Flaming Heart (1958), a collection of essays that traces literary relations between England and Italy from Chaucer to T. S. Eliot; and Elizabeth Mainwaring: Italian Landscape in Eighteenth Century England: A Study Chiefly of the Influence of Claude Lorrain and Salvator Rosa on English Taste, 1700–1800 (1925).
The major works on the various arts deal in detail with English taste, as do the better biographies of individual artists. I have also learned from B. Sprague Allen: Tides in English Taste (1619–1800): A Background for the Study of Literature, 2 vols. (1937), scattered and informal but informative. Christopher Hussey: The Picturesque: Studies in A Point of View (1927) is the standard monograph on an important subject. It may now be supplemented with Walter J. Hipple: The Beautiful, the Sublime, and the Picturesque in Eighteenth-Century British Aesthetic Theory (1957). For English criticism see the relevant chapters in Wellek: History of Modern Criticism, I, on “Dr. Johnson,” and “The Minor English and Scottish Critics.” The best special study on Johnson’s taste and criticism is, among a large supply, J. H. Hagstrum: Samuel Johnson’s Literary Criticism (1952). Among specialized treatments I can only list a few: Ernst Cassirer: The Platonic Renaissance in England (1932; tr. James P. Pettegrove, 1953), which ends with Shaftesbury; on Shaftesbury see also R. L. Brett: The Third Earl of Shaftesbury (1951); for Francis Hutcheson, W. R. Scott: Francis Hutcheson (1900) is the standard work. For the development of the novel, which played a major part in the development of taste and of criticism itself, I mention only Alan Dugald McKillop: The Early Masters of English Fiction (1956), with fine essays on Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, and Sterne, and comprehensive bibliographical indications. Louis I. Bredvold: The Literature of the Restoration and the Eighteenth Century, 1660–1789 (edn. 1962) is short and dependable; it also has an excellent bibliography (as does Wellek: History of Modern Criticism) for those who wish to go further. I shall take up Burke and Hume separately later, in section 2 of chap. vi.
Sir John Summerson: Architecture in Britain: 1530–1830 (3rd edn., 1958) is a comprehensive and magnificently well-informed survey. (Geoffrey Webb: “Architecture and the Garden,” in Johnson’s England, II, 93–124, should also be consulted.) Other valuable books by Summerson that I have used with profit are his Georgian London (rev. edn., 1962); Christopher Wren (1953), to be supplemented by his lucid essay, “The Mind of Wren,” reprinted in his Heavenly Mansions and Other Essays in Architecture (edn. 1963), 51–86; and his Sir John Soane (1952). Summerson’s “John Wood and the English Town-Planning Tradition,” also in Heavenly Mansions, 87–110, moves into the heart of that triumph of eighteenth-century architecture—Bath. For the same subject, see W. Ison: The Georgian Buildings of Bath (1948).
Rudolf Wittkower has written some important papers on English Palladianism, a subject of great importance to social history. Among these papers, of particular importance are “Pseudo-Palladian Elements in English Neo-Classical Architecture,” Journal of the Warburg Institute, VI (1943), 154–64; “Lord Burlington and William Kent,” Archaeological Journal, CII (1945), 151–64; and The Earl of Burlington and William Kent (Occasional Papers of the York Georgian Society, No. 5 [1948]). Summerson’s treatment in Architecture in Britain (much indebted to Wittkower) is also worth reading. To this should be added Margaret Jourdain: The Work of William Kent, Artist, Painter, Designer and Landscape Gardener (1948). The work of James Gibbs is summarized in Bryan D. G. Little: The Life and Work of James Gibbs, 1682–1754 (1955). On Kent’s impertinence to his “betters,” see Peter Quennell: Hogarth’s Progress (1955), 41–4.
For developments in the architecture of the later eighteenth century, the books on the Adam brothers are particularly instructive. John Fleming: Robert Adam and His Circle in Edinburgh and Rome (1962) is an excellent study resting on hitherto unpublished material; it is to be followed by a similar study on Robert Adam’s later career. Meanwhile we have James Lees-Milne: The Age of Adam (1947), and the older A. T. Bolton: Robert and James Adam, 2 vols. (1922). A. J. Youngson: The Making of Classical Edinburgh: 1750–1840 (1966) is scholarly, well illustrated, engaging, and informative. Closely related to architecture, of course, and of vital importance to an understanding of English social ideals and ways of spending money, is the garden. The best introduction doubtless is Dorothy Stroud: Capability Brown (2d edn., 1957).
For English painting in the age of Enlightenment, the volume in the Pelican History of Art, Ellis K. Waterhouse: Painting in Britain: 1530 to 1790 (1953), though of necessity a little crowded, is authoritative. Waterhouse explicitly connects the famous English passion for portraits with the rise of the painters: varied and individualized portraiture, he writes, “contributed more than anything else to raising the status of portraiture and of the painter in England, where the native practitioner had been despised.… This raising of the status of the British artist was the political objective of Reynolds’s life and the mainspring of his conduct as first President of the Royal Academy” (163). Andrew Shirley: “Painting and Engraving,” in Johnson’s England, II, 41–71, is filled with useful material for the social history of the art. R. and S. Redgrave: A Century of Painters of the English School, 2 vols. (1866; edn. 1947), though very old, has much good material and many good anecdotes. W. T. Whitley: Artists and their Friends in England, 1700–1799, 2 vols. (1928), more up to date, is equally entertaining and informative. William Gaunt: A Concise History of English Painting (1964), very concise indeed, has several helpful chapters on the period. C. H. Collins Baker and M. R. James: British Painting (1933), is the standard survey history. Edgar Wind: “Humanitätsidee und heroisiertes Porträt in der englischen Kultur des 18ten Jahrhunderts,” Warburg Vorträge 1930–1 (1932), 156–229, is a brilliant attempt to link art and philosophy.
On individual painters: Ellis K. Waterhouse’s brief Gainsborough (1958), includes studies of the painter’s character and income. It should be supplemented by Waterhouse’s specialized articles, listed in his bibliography (49). The large standard life, Thomas Gainsborough (1915), by William T. Whitley, is excellent. Mary Woodall’s edition, The Letters of Thomas Gainsborough (1961), is scholarly and instructive. For Reynolds, the old life by Charles Robert Leslie and Tom Taylor: Life and Times of Sir Joshua Reynolds, 2 vols. (1865), remains indispensable, but must be supplemented with Ellis K. Waterhouse: Reynolds (1941), a good modern account, and the splendid specialized studies by Frederick W. Hilles, who has edited the Letters of Sir Joshua Reynolds (1929), written a highly informative study on The Literary Career of Sir Joshua Reynolds (1936), to which I am deeply indebted, and published some fascinating, hitherto unpublished writings—essays, character sketches, imaginary dialogues, Portraits by Sir Joshua Reynolds (1952), from which I have quoted in the text. Hilles quotes Boswell’s regret that Reynolds was not a Christian (18). For Reynolds as a writer, see Hilles: “Sir Joshua’s Prose,” in The Age of Johnson: Essays Presented to Chauncey B. Tinker, ed. Frederick W. Hilles (1949), 49–60. The question of Reynolds’s originality and borrowing is analyzed by Edgar Wind in “Humanitätsidee und heroisiertes Porträt in der englischen Kultur des 18. Jahrhunderts” (see just above). Reynolds’s Discourses on Art have been republished often; I have used the best critical edition, by Robert R. Wark (1959). Discourse XIV, incidentally, is a fine appreciation of Gainsborough, written shortly after his death in 1788. One rather neglected painter now coming into his own is Allan Ramsay. See Alastair Smart: The Life and Art of Allan Ramsay (1952), and the catalogue by Colin Thompson and Robin Hutchison: Allan Ramsay (1713–1784), His Masters and Rivals (1963). The colorful Hogarth has attracted many students. Quennell: Hogarth’s Progress (just cited), though popular in appearance, is well done; it includes an interesting discussion of Hogarth’s “war” with the connoisseurs (139–41), as does Joseph Burke’s “Introduction” to his indispensable edition of Hogarth’s The Analysis of Beauty (1955). Burke’s Hogarth and Reynolds, A Contrast in English Art Theory (1943) fruitfully pits the aesthetic revolutionary against the majestic neoclassicist. See also R. B. Beckett: Hogarth (1949). There have been some splendid recent editions of his output, notably by Ronald Paulson: Hogarth’s Graphic Work, 2 vols. (1965), which should be consulted. Lichtenberg’s Commentaries on Hogarth’s Engravings (tr. and ed., with an Introduction, by Innes and Gustav Herden, 1966), is an interesting confrontation of German philosophe and English rebel. For Hogarth’s dependence on Dutch and Italian sources, see Pevsner: Englishness of English Art, 28–30, 209. (For a comment on Antal’s Hogarth, see above, 633–4.)
English musical life is splendidly mirrored in Paul Henry Lang’s biography of Handel (see above, 635). Another valuable source for the social historian is Roger Lonsdale: Dr. Charles Burney: A Literary Biography (1965), which places the man in his culture. And see Bruce Simonds: “Music in Johnson’s London,” The Age of Johnson, 411–20.
Garrick, who so impressed Reynolds and Diderot—as he impressed everyone—is portrayed in an informative recent biography by Carola Oman: David Garrick (1958). The earlier book by Frank A. Hedgcock: A Cosmopolitan Actor: David Garrick and His French Friends (n.d., 1912?) has much useful material on Garrick’s influence on the philosophes.
On sculpture in England, the authoritative monographs by Katharine A. Esdaile—“Sculpture,” Johnson’s England, II, 72–92; Roubiliac’s Work at Trinity College, Cambridge (1924); Life and Work of L. F. Roubiliac (1928); and English Monumental Sculpture (1937)—can now be supplemented by Margaret Whinney: Sculpture in Britain: 1530–1830 (1964). J. T. Smith: Nollekens and His Times, 2 vols. (2d edn., 1829) remains amusing and very informative.
The development of artistic theories and art criticism in eighteenth-century France has been dealt with ably in three books that have become minor classics in the literature, and from which I have learned much. I have already mentioned two of them—W. Folkierski: Entre le classicisme et le romantisme and Dresdner: Die Entstehung der Kunstkritik. To this I should now add André Fontaine: Les doctrines d’art en France de Poussin à Diderot (1909). Kristeller’s articles, “The Modern System of the Arts” (cited above, 636), have much valuable material. I am also indebted to Herbert Dieckmann: “Zur Theorie der Lyrik im 18. Jahrhundert in Frankreich, mit gelegentlicher Berücksichtigung der englischen Kritik,” in Immanente Aesthetik-Aesthetische Reflexion (1966), 73–112; and to Dieckmann: “Die Wandlung des Nachahmungsbegriffes in der französischen Aesthetik des 18. Jahrhunderts,” in Nachahmung und Illusion (June 1964), 28–59—two splendid essays.
For painting, Jacques Thuillier and Albert Châtelet: French Painting: From Le Nain to Fragonard (tr. J. Emmons, 1964), is sensible and realistic; it should be supplemented by Michael Levey: Rococo to Revolution (see above, 626), which though it deals with all of Europe concentrates on France. L. Réau: Histoire de la peinture française au XVIIIe siècle (1925) and L. Dimier: Les peintres français du XVIIIe siècle (1928–30) should also be consulted. Denys Sutton’s catalogue of the Winter exhibition at the Royal Academy in London, France in the Eighteenth Century (1968), is splendid and rich. A subject of great importance is treated by J. Locquin: La Peinture d’histoire en France de 1747 à 1785 (1912). Fiske Kimball: The Creation of the Rococo (1943), is a scholarly and detailed examination of a style which, Kimball persuasively argues, was not merely a modification or perversion of baroque, but a real style.
There are now fine studies of individual painters. Georges Wildenstein: Chardin (edn. 1963) is a model, as is his The Paintings of Fragonard (trs. C. W. Chilton and A. L. Kitson, n.d., 1960?). Wildenstein has also done pioneering work on the still obscure question of eighteenth-century French patronage in two valuable articles: “L’abbé de Saint-Non: Artiste et Mécène,” Gazette des Beaux Arts, LIV (November 1959), 225–44; and “Un Amateur de Boucher et de Fragonard, Jacques-Onésyme Bergeret (1715–1785),” ibid., LVIII (July–August 1961), 39–84. More work needs to be done on the megalomaniacal Greuze, who so interested Diderot; there is, meanwhile, C. Mauclair: Greuze et son temps (1926). Anita Brookner: “Jean-Baptiste Greuze, I,” The Burlington Magazine, LXXXXVIII (May 1956), 157–62, and “Jean-Baptiste Greuze, II,” ibid. (June 1956), 192–9, are straightforward biography, helpful but not profound. For Boucher see A. Michel (1907).
For French sculpture, see the titles on Falconet (above, 604, 640), Paul Vitry: La Sculpture française classique de Jean Goujon à Rodin (1934), especially part III, and the somewhat older though still useful book by Edmund Hildebrandt, Malerei und Plastik des 18. Jahrhunderts in Frankreich (1924). French architecture of the period is introduced in Blunt: Art and Architecture in France (cited above, 640), which takes it almost to the end of the reign of Louis XIV. Emil Kaufmann: Architecture in the Age of Reason: Baroque and Post-Baroque in England, Italy, and France (1955), though difficult, is an immensely rewarding collection of essays. Louis Hautecœur: Histoire de l’architecture classique en France, 7 vols. (1943–57), is already a classic work of reference. See also Wolfgang Herrmann: Laugier and 18th Century French Theory (1962), an excellent study of an influential writer on architecture. (For the theater in France, see chap. vi, section 1.)
What I said in The Rise of Modern Paganism—that the need for good work on eighteenth-century German cultural history remains great—is just as true now as it was then. For the main titles, see above, 576, and add Eric A. Blackall: The Emergence of German as a Literary Language, 1700–1775 (1959), a masterly assessment of an important subject. Max von Boehn’s heavily illustrated, superficial, excessively patriotic, but not uninformative Deutschland im 18ten Jahrhundert, 2 vols. (1921); and Albert Köster’s essay Die deutsche Literatur der Aufklärungszeit (1925), [all in I, 440], can be consulted with profit. Similar to von Boehn’s work, as well illustrated and more sensibly written, is Hermann Schmitz: Kunst und Kultur des 18. Jahrhunderts in Deutschland (1922). Another chauvinistic work, again full of useful material, is Deutsches Barock und Rokoko, ed. Georg Biermann (1914); and see Georg Steinhausen: Geschichte der deutschen Kultur (3rd edn., 1929). Among general histories of German literature, I found F. J. Schneider: Die deutsche Dichtung zwischen Barock und Klassizismus, 1700–1785 (1924), most substantial and reliable; the difficulty with much recent writing on German literature and art is that it is colored by the Nazi experience—the later editions of works first written in the 1920s often reflect their authors’ subservience to the new regime, and books written by older men after 1945 often reflect hasty re-revision of their ideology. For German art in the general, see the splendid survey by Georg Dehio: Geschichte der deutschen Kunst, III (2d edn., 1931). While he rather overstates his case, Louis Réau’s work is of importance; his titles announce his thesis: Histoire de l’expansion de l’art français, 4 vols. (1924–33); and, even more important, L’Europe française (1938). France dominated Germany—and to some extent Europe—but not to the extent Réau suggests. I found Nicolas Powell: From Baroque to Rococo: An Introduction to Austrian and German Architecture from 1580 to 1790 (1959) exemplary among a literature that usually consists of picture books. For the greatest German architect of the century, see Max H. von Freeden: Balthasar Neumann, Leben und Werk (1953).
The literature on Weimar, naturally immense, is well summarized in Bruford’s Classical Weimar (cited above). For a general survey of smaller lands, singling out two, the Duchy of Württemberg and the County of Montbeliard, see Adrien Fauchier-Magnan: The Small German Courts in the 18th Century (1947; tr. Mervyn Savill, 1958), which has many telling quotations. The collective volume Die Stadt Goethes, ed. H. Voelcker, is very illuminating on local artists and patronage. For Berlin the old but comprehensive book by Ludwig Geiger: Berlin 1688–1840: Geschichte des geistigen Lebens der preussischen Hauptstadt, 2 vols. in 4 parts, I (1892–3), remains a mine of information.
This brings me to Frederick’s Prussia. Here the material is abundant but must be used with care—I have commented on German adulation of “Frederick the Unique,” set off by often unreasoned hostility on the part of French writers, in The Rise of Modern Paganism, 544. The most comprehensive biography remains Reinhold Koser: Geschichte Friedrichs des Grossen, 4 vols. (4th and 5th edns., 1912), although it too lacks objectivity. [See I, 544, where I also cite the brilliant essay by Wilhelm Dilthey: “Friedrich der Grosse und die deutsche Aufklärung,” Gesammelte Schriften, III, 81–205.] (The works I shall cite below [654–5] on Lessing, and, after that on Winckelmann, also contain much material.) For Gottsched see above all Gustav Waniek: Gottsched und die deutsche Literatur seiner Zeit (1897), and Max Koch: Gottsched und die Reform der deutschen Literatur im 18. Jahrhundert (1887). A modern study would be welcome.
There is one vexed question to which all historians of German eighteenth-century culture must address themselves: what was the impact of the Thirty Years’ War? See on this topic especially Francis L. Carsten: “Was There an Economic Decline in Germany Before the 30 Years’ War?,” English Historical Review, LXXI (1956), 240–7; and the judicious historiographical and bibliographical survey by Theodore K. Rabb: “The Effects of the Thirty Years’ War on the German Economy,” Journal of Modern History, XXXIV, 1 (March 1962), 40–51, which sensibly calls for more regional studies.
Italian art has been well dealt with. Wittkower: Art and Architecture in Italy (see above, 638) reaches to mid-century, as does Haskell: Patrons and Painters (above, 638). See also, amid a large literature, Michael Levey: Painting in XVIIIth Century Venice (1959), and G. Lorenzetti: La pittura italiana del Settecento (1948). F. J. B. Watson: Canaletto (edn. 1954) and G. Fiocco: Francesco Guardi (1923) are also helpful. There are two interesting essays on art in the set of lectures delivered to the Italian Institute in 1957–8, Art and Ideas in Eighteenth-Century Italy (1960)—Francis Haskell: “Taste and Reputation: A Study of Change in Italian Art of the 18th Century” (83–93), and Michael Levey: “Tiepolo and His Age” (94–113).