Rococo & Neoclassicism

In the early 18th century the grandeur of the Baroque gave way to the Rococo: lighter colours, playful elegance and scenes of love and leisure, as in the work of Jean-Honoré Fragonard, while in Venice Canaletto painted sparkling views of the city for travellers on the Grand Tour. In Britain, Thomas Gainsborough and William Hogarth developed portraiture and moral satire, and Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun became one of the most sought-after portraitists of her time.

From the 1760s, inspired by the excavations at Herculaneum and Pompeii, Neoclassicism called for clarity, discipline and civic virtue. Jacques-Louis David became its leading painter in revolutionary and Napoleonic France, and his pupil Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres carried its pure line into the 19th century; Francisco de Goya, beginning as a court painter, moved far beyond both styles.