publication in 1747 of La Font de Saint Yenne’s Reflexions (see Chapter 2) the role of the public as
active arbiter in matters of taste became much more important. In the seventeenth century, the writer on the
arts, Roland Fréart, sieur de Chambray (1606–1676), had expressed in his Idea of the Perfection of
Painting (Idée de la perfection de la peinture, 1662) the idea that a constituency extending beyond “men
of letters and those of noble condition” (cited in Crow, 1985, 31) to the “common man” might contribute
valid opinions on art, although, still bound by the conventions of his time, he associated this broader
constituency with those who valued classical artists such as Raphael and Poussin.
Crow defines eighteenthcentury conceptions of the “public” as a discursive formation; that is, as a
cluster of ideas shaped by new tendencies in the use of language arising from a redirection of power
structures away from the religious to the secular and toward a broader merging of social ranks.
Proliferating use of the term “public” related, in turn, to popular social practices that included
participation in the clubs, salons, societies, exhibitions, salesrooms and publishing industry that
facilitated in the eighteenth century a lively culture of social and economic exchange (Brewer, 1997, x).
The term began to reflect the new ideologies or values of an expanded commercial and educated class
(Crow, 1985, 4, 103–104). More recently, scholars have drawn more attention to the active role of
women in this “public,” particularly as patrons, consumers and subjects in art (Hyde and Milam, 2003).
The notion of the “public sphere” is one now commonly applied in eighteenthcentury studies. This
phrase reflects the fact that after centuries in which the power to formulate values and opinions was
dictated by a small elite, in countries in which a less exclusive culture had evolved, artists, writers and
composers could create works with a freer, wideranging “public” in mind: they could engage with, and
even help to shape, new kinds of communal values (Craske, 2000, 14–15). In a country such as France,
which witnessed severe political upheaval, notions of the “public” often implied the ideal of a unified
Nation. The artist Coypel identified however the heterogeneity of tastes expressed in reality by this
“public”:
...twenty publics of different tone and character in the course of a single day: a simple public at
certain times, a prejudiced public, a flighty public, an envious public, a public slavish to fashion.... A
final accounting of these publics would lead to infinity.
(Mercure de France, 1751, cited in Crow, 1985, 10)The ideal of a cohesive public remained unrealized in France until the Revolution, when many saw
reforming ministers and radical pamphleteers as its spokesmen. Such unity dissolved again, however, as
events generated by the Revolution itself – the Terror, an emerging entrepreneurial culture – undermined
previous unifying ideologies (Wrigley, 1993, 10, 91–111). And yet the idea of a “public” remained
influential. Although the Académie royale had responded defensively to the disruptive 1747 attacks on its
standards by La Font de Saint Yenne, there was later in the century a growing body of commentators on
art, for example, Du Bos and Diderot, who welcomed the role of an educated (and ideally consensual)
public taste in mitigating the effects of an arid or mannered academicism. Visitors to the Salons could
play an important role in this. Reasonable public voices on art were deemed qualified to pronounce, for
example, on the naturalness or plausibility of contemporary representations of people, places and stories
in art. From 1747, the French “public” (salon viewers, critics, theorists) voiced increasing concerns
about what it perceived as the dire state of history painting. It spoke ostensibly out of concern for the
“Nation” and through suspicion of a culture still largely dictated by a government seeking to shore up its
own power. In debates about history painting, the growing boldness of an art “public” began to acquire
real agency in cultural politics, especially where powerful factions were involved.
Habermas (see Introduction) conceived of the “bourgeois [or middle class] sphere” as arising from