18th Century
Art made between 1700 and 1799: Rococo elegance, Venetian ceilings, the rediscovery of antiquity and the rise of Neoclassicism.
426 works · 10 related artists
About
European art of the 18th century moved from ornament towards restraint. The early decades favoured the Rococo, a light, curving style of pastel colour and intimate subjects, from François Boucher's pink-skinned mythologies to Jean-Honoré Fragonard's The Swing (about 1767), with its flying slipper. In Venice, Giambattista Tiepolo opened palace and church ceilings onto luminous skies, while Jean-Siméon Chardin in Paris painted kitchen utensils and children at play with a quiet gravity the Rococo lacked.
Excavations at Herculaneum and Pompeii from the 1730s and 1740s, and the travels of young aristocrats through Italy, fed a passion for antiquity. Giovanni Battista Piranesi etched Rome's ruins on a dramatic scale, Robert Adam designed Neoclassical interiors in Britain, and Thomas Jefferson modelled Virginia's capitol on a Roman temple. Jacques-Louis David's Oath of the Horatii (1784) gave the new style its moral charge on the eve of revolution.
